Exploring Place in The Australian Landscape (2022)

Exploring Place
in the Australian
Landscape
In the Country of the White Cockatoo
David S. Jones
Exploring Place in the Australian Landscape
“This profoundly important, unique work helps to bridge the gulf between
Koorie and Western perceptions of the Australian landscape and ways of seeing,
being and understanding the world and our place in it. It is concurrently sophis-
ticated, erudite and poetic, offering a rare depth of insight.”
—Dr Joshua Zeunert, Senior Scientia Lecturer, University of
New South Wales, Australia.
“This timely and well written book is based upon the author’s close personal and
professional relationships with the Western District region of Victoria that spans
many decades. It heralds a new way of relating to Australian cultural landscapes,
which encourages the merging of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous realms of
knowledge and perception of country in the aim of producing a novel and more
respectful sense of place that will prove more meaningful to all future Australians.”
—Dr Philip A. Clarke, Consultant Anthropologist & Adjunct Senior
Research Fellow at Griffith & Federation Universities.
David S. Jones
Exploring Place in
the Australian
Landscape
In the Country of the White Cockatoo
David S. Jones
Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation
Djilang/Geelong, Australia
ISBN 978-981-19-3212-0 ISBN 978-981-19-3213-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7
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Warning
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that
the following text may contain voices and names of People
who have passed and who have ventured into the Dreaming.
Foreword
Cultural landscapes reflect the interactions between people and their natu-
ral environment over space and time … A cultural landscape is a complex
phenomenon with a tangible and intangible identity. The intangible com-
ponent arises from ideas and interactions which have an impact on the
perceptions and shaping of a landscape, such as sacred beliefs closely linked
to the landscape and the way it has been perceived over time. Cultural
landscapes mirror the cultures which created them. (my italics)1
The ethos of this timely book is encapsulated in the aforementioned

observation that cultural landscapes mirror the cultures which created them.
In terms of the book, these words aptly summarise the importance and
pivotal role of Landscape—for Indigenous Australians, Country—in
understanding sense of place held by communities. Country and
Landscape are two words that resonate with association of ideas linked to
an enduring sense of place. Both have tangible physical presence and
intangible symbolic values. Country is an Aboriginal construct encapsu-
lating the rich meaning and inter-relationships between people and
places. Landscape is a European notion which also centres on people and
1
Plachter H and Rössler M (1995) ‘Cultural Landscapes: Reconnecting Culture and Nature’ in
Bvon Droste, H. Plachter & M. Rössler (eds.), Cultural Landscapes of Universal Value—Components
of a Global Strategy, Jena: Fischer; p.15.
vii
viii Foreword
places; something we see with our eye but interpret with our mind.2
Underpinning Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal attachment to country
and landscape, respectively, are deeply rooted values, ideologies, and
meanings which give rise to a sense of human identity. Aesthetic response
to both in the context of aesthetics as a way of seeing based on experience
and traditions may be seen to have cross-cultural connections and com-
mon ground as well as differences. It is these aspects of sense of place
through knowing Country or Landscape that permeate and inform
the book.
Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies Ken Taylor AM

Research School of Humanities and the Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra, Australia
Silpakorn University Bangkok, Bangkok, Thailand
Rutgers University, Camden, USA
2
Meinig, D W, (1979), ‘Introduction’ in Meinig D W (ed), The Interpretation of Ordinary
Landscapes. Geographical Essays, Oxford University Press, New York.
Acknowledgement to Country
I would like to acknowledge the Peoples who are the Traditional Owners
of the Country’s upon which this book and its substance originate. I pay
my respects to their spirit and passion in their past and present and emer-
gent custodianship of these Country’s, including its lands, waters, skies,
and terrestrial and aquatic inhabitants. I thank them for their sharing and
participating in this educational journey. In addition, I would like to pay
my respect to the Elders in past, present, and emerging of the Gunditjmara,
Wadawurrung, Wurundjeri, Bunurong, and Kaurna Peoples who have
opened up their voices to me and I extend that respect to other Aboriginals
and Torres Strait Islander Peoples within this readership.
You have been here for 200 years and look how much of my Country you white-
fellas have stuffed up. We have been here for 60,000 years, and we are now
attempting to fix your mistakes so that we can be here on our Country for the
next 60,000 years. You guys need to learn better. (Bell pers. comm., 2012)
ix
Language, Grammar, and Referencing
While English remains pre-eminent in editorial and academic expecta-

tions, ‘Aboriginal English’ sits uncomfortably within the eyes of editors.
Where relevant, the latter has been used through this book to reflect
authenticity.
Importantly, within both ‘English’ and ‘Aboriginal English’, there are
different uses, spellings, and application. In all quotations within this
book, the original grammar and spelling have been respected to reflect
authenticity.
For Chaps. 3–6, the referencing, in the original research, was very
extensive but for the purposes of this book, it has been condensed and
simplified at the end of each chapter. The complete referencing per quo-
tation and mention is contained in Jones (1993).
Words or terms in square parentheses indicate the equivalent contem-
porary words or terms for that preceding. The spelling is also consistent
with that used in the original primary material.
Words or terms in italics are: printed that way in the original text; titles
of books, poems, or paintings (usually accompanied by their year); scien-
tific names for the species; extracts from actual poems; or, Aboriginal
nouns for which meanings are provided in square parentheses.
Contemporary or re-applied Aboriginal nomenclature draws heavily
upon James Dawson’s The Australian Aborigines: The Languages and
xi
xii Language, Grammar, and Referencing
Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria,

Australia (1881), and Ian D Clark’s Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An
Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900 (1990).
Language used is indicative only and should not be assumed to be lin-
guistically (in both meaning and spelling) correct for use today. The
reader should consult the relevant Registered Aboriginal Party in Victoria
for the correct Language nomenclature and appellation today.
‘….’ Words enclosed by single quotation marks will be run, station or
property names, unless printed that way in the original text. Aboriginal-
derived and colonial place or town names remain in plain text. Pseudonyms
are identified by single quotation marks.
a A single letter in a word or term underlined should be read as a letter
that is over-lined in the original text, as used by Dawson (1881). The
underlining has been linguistically and correctly applied where terms are
from the Anangu Aboriginal Peoples of the Western Desert, as is contem-
porary practice. In these cases, a notation to the term normally appears
thereafter.
Spelling and punctuation used, especially for vernacular or Aboriginal
words, is orthographically consistent with the original text.
Conversion table
1 inch – 2.54 centimetres (cm)
1 foot – 30.5 centimetres (cm)
1 yard – 0.914 metres (m)
1 rod – 5.029 metres (m)
1 chain – 20.117 metres (m)
1 mile – 1.61 kilometres (km)
1 acre – 0.405 hectares (ha)
10 acres – 4.047 hectares (ha)
1 bushel – 0.0364 metres³ (m³)
1 mile2 – 2.59 kilometres2 (km2)
0° Fahrenheit – 32° Celsius
1 shilling (1s.) – 10 cents (10c)
Abstract
Landscape is a sea of myths and embroidery threads in a larger tapestry.

These stories and patterns collectively form the meanings and sense of
place of a particular landscape that construct its genius loci. Laying bare
the specificity and difference in place is, therefore, important in under-
standing the essential spirit and fragility of the sense.
Using the landscape of the Western District in Australia as a model, an
ethno-ecological analysis was charted through vertical landscape themes,
between the colonial years 1800 and 1900. Aboriginal and colonial cul-
tures were juxtaposed against each other in an attempt to discern the
most powerful influences and patterns in this landscape. An imaginative
multi-genre narrative format was also applied to better express time,
voices, and languages that celebrate and maintain these myths and threads
as part of this research approach.
The results of the approach point to the dominance of certain signifi-
cant landscape themes that influence the form, patterns, and experience
of the landscape. Dominating themes, using the titles adopted herein,
include natural and cultural rhythms, routes, domains, centres, plants,
and imagery. Myths are indelibly woven into the explanatory meanings of
landscape features, irrespective of culture, and are accentuated by the
powerful horizontality and expansiveness of the District. Nature still con-
trols human occupancy regimes and is revered by those who have grown
familiar with its personality. The approach also provides a successful and
xiii
xiv Abstract
challenging alternate avenue for reading and inquiring into landscape

histories and meanings.
Certain distinctive myths, texts, and patterns construct the meanings
and environment of this landscape. A sense of foreboding power binds
these threads into a unique tapestry. Conceivably, similar themes have a
major influence in instilling a sense of place in other Australian landscapes.
Keywords Sense of Place • genius loci • Country • Indigenous Knowledge

Systems • Western District • Australia
Acknowledgements
At the core of this publication, there are many people who have directly
or indirectly had a voice and affect upon this journey and its research.
Each cannot be individually named but most of my guidance, support
and encouragement lies with the following people who charted my for-
mative thinkings: Dan Rose, Anne Whiston Spirn, Jim and Curtis
Sinatra, Jane and Malcolm Calder, Ian D. Clark, George Seddon (dec.),
John (dec.) and Cecily Fenton, Charlie and Amanda Fairbairn, Sam
Winter-Cooke, Natalie Gray, Robert St George, John Benwell, Christa
Wilmanns-Wells, Uncle Paddy Roe (dec.), Frans Hoogland and members
of the Goolarabooloo Community the numerous students and graduates
of the RMIT Landscape Architecture course who have shared with me
their friendship and inquisitiveness, and new-found colleagues from the
University of Pennsylvania that maintained their interest and communi-
cation with me. In particular, thanks to both my parents and family who,
while have grown weary of the original thesis and this publication proj-
ect, have continued to supporting ask after it and its progress into this
publication. The enticement to pursue this work was also made possible
by the Sinatra’s, James Weirick, Leon van Schaik, Dan Rose, Ken Taylor
and George Seddon (dec.) and Anne Whiston Spirn. This research is
about places and their sensibilities. Thoughts and experiences of two con-
tinents have influenced this journey and this publication. It is in
xv
xvi Acknowledgements
particular to the landscape and properties of the Western District that

this exposition is inscribed.
Following the core research, many people have continued to encourage
me in both continuing and realising this research, but have also taught
me, including Chase Aghan, Belinda Allwood, Damein Bell, Kelly Ann
Blake, N’Arweet Carolyn Briggs, Jo Brooke, Robert Buggy, Philip
A. Clarke, Michael Cook, Paul Davis, Marcia Devlin, Corrina Eccles,
Uncle Norm Eccles, Hisham Elkadi, Shaneen Fantin, Greg Grabasch,
Elizabeth Grant (dec.), James Hackel, Scott Heyes, Peter Hogg, Darryl
Low Choy, Shay-lish McMahon, Ian McNiven, David Mathews, Mandy
Nicholson, Uncle Lewis O’Brien, Michael [Mickey] O’Brien,
B.J. O’Toole, Paul Paton, Aunty Dot Peters, Anne-Marie Pisani, Uncle
Bryon Powell, Gareth Powell, Aunty Kat Rodwell, Glenn Romanis,
Phillip B. and Pam Roös, Denis Rose, Mark Rose, David Rowe, Susan
Ryan, Norm Sheehan, Aunty Mary Shuttleworth, Kapila D. Silva,
Stephanie [Anie] Skinner, Gheran Steele, Ken Taylor, Tandop David
Tournier (dec.), Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin, Georgina Williams (dec.),
Allam Zaheer, and Josh Zeunert.
I thank Mitchell for his patience and quiet encouragement, and my
parents in enabling this journey.
I would also like to thank the team at Springer who were also most
supportive in enabling the finalisation of this project over the covid
months and years.
Contents
1 Entering
the Journey into Genius Loci 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Sense of Place 3
1.3 Journey into Landscape 6
1.4 PreCursors for This Journey 9
References 10
2 P
lace, Country, and Genius Loci 13
2.1 Introduction 14
2.2 Navigating the Western Philosophy of Genius 16
2.3 Navigating the Landscape of Genius 20
2.4 Navigating Country [of Genius] 30
2.5 Roadmaps to Reading, Experiencing, and Understanding 38
References 42
3 Sense
of Place: The Western District of Australia 49
3.1 Living in Australia Felix 50
3.2 Rhythms: The Land Beyond the Sky 56
3.3 Rhythms Tapestry 67
References 68
xvii
xviii Contents
4 1
800–1840: Country Dreaming 71
4.1 ‘Here Is My Country …; My Barbary …’ 71
4.2 Paths Through Grasses 82
4.3 Points on Waark 88
4.4 Scoria, Bough, and Leaf 96
4.5 Dancing Fires in Grasses 100
4.6 White Cockatoo Twilight 112
4.7 Sacred Voices in the Landscape 129
4.8 Country Dreaming Tapestry 138
References144
5 1
830–1870: Colonial Noontide155
5.1 Designs and Reflections 155
5.2 Swagmen to the Skies 174
5.3 Campfires on the Plains 184
5.4 Split Slabs and Bluestone 199
5.5 Cowpastures of Themeda214
5.6 Land of the Hunt 232
5.7 ‘Light on the Iron’ 242
5.8 Noontide Tapestry 254
References261
6 1
860–1900: ‘Sunlit Afternoon’273
6.1 Knowing ‘The Land Out There’ 273
6.2 ‘Where the Earth Met the Sky’ 286
6.3 Markers on the Plains 296
6.4 Crowning Follies 302
6.5 ‘Immeasurable, Grassy Plains’ 313
6.6 Domains of Jumbucks 329
6.7 ‘Rust on the Iron’ 340
6.8 Sunlit Afternoon Tapestry 352
References358
7 Salient
Threads and Contemporary Narratives371
7.1 Introduction 371
7.2 Salient Threads 372
Contents xix
7.3 Contemporary Narratives 384

7.4 Sense Place of the Western District Landscape 388
7.5 Translating Place and the Strengths and Nuances of Its
Human Relationships: Going Forward 390
References391
8 Sense
of Place Mappings403
References406
Plant and Animal Nomenclature Glossary409
R
eferences425
P
lace Names Index475
Run and Station Names Index487

About the Author
David S. Jones is a Professor (Research) at the Indigenous Studies

Research Centre at Monash University, an Adjunct Professor at the
Faculty of Art & Design at the University of Canberra, and an Adjunct
Associate Professor at the Cities Research Institute at Griffith University.
He presently oversights strategic planning and urban design for the
Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (WTOAC)
whose Country spans from Bella-wein/Bellarine Peninsula to Djilang/
Geelong to Werribi Yalluk/Werribee River to Ballaarat/Ballarat to Yarram
Yarram/Beaufort.
David was formerly head of the School of Architecture, Landscape
Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Adelaide, and
Foundation Professor of Planning and Landscape Architecture at
Deakin University. With academic and professional qualifications in
urban planning, landscape architecture, and cultural heritage, he has
taught, researched, and published extensively across these discipline
areas in the past 35 years, including in cultural landscapes and indige-
nous knowledge systems.
He has been involved with the Australian Institute of Landscape
Architects (AILA)-awarded Victoria Square/Tarntanyangga Regeneration
Project (2017); authored the AILA and Planning Institute of Australia
(PIA)-awarded Adelaide Park Lands and Squares Cultural Landscape
Assessment Study (2007) that underpinned the successful ‘Adelaide Park
xxi
xxii About the Author
Lands and City Layout’ National Heritage registration; co-authored

Learning Country in Landscape Architecture Indigenous Knowledge Systems,
Respect and Appreciation (2021); was involved in the design of Museum
Victoria’s multi-awarded ‘Forest Gallery’ (1995–1996); co-authored the
AILA-awarded North Gardens Indigenous Sculpture Landscape Master Plan
(2019), Geelong’s Changing Landscape (2019), and the AILA and PIA-
awarded Re-casting Terra Nullius Blindness (2017); oversighted the AILA
and PIA-awarded Avalon Corridor Strategy Cultural Values Assessment
(2021); and co-contributed chapters to or co-edited the Routledge
Handbook to Landscape and Food (2018), The Handbook of Contemporary
Indigenous Architecture (2018), Routledge Handbook on Historic Urban
Landscapes of the Asia-Pacific (2020), Heal the Scar: Regenerative Futures of
Damaged Landscapes (2020), and Routledge Handbook of Cultural
Landscapes in the Asia-Pacific (2022).
Disclaimer: The words, views, and opinions expressed in this publica-
tion are those of the author solely and do not necessarily reflect the val-
ues, language, words, and Paleert Tjaara Dja: Healthy Country Plan
(2020) aspirations of the Wadawurrung People nor the Wadawurrung
Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (WTOAC), nor of Monash
University, University of Canberra, or Griffith University, and should in
no way be interpreted as such in any manner or quotation.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Landscape features and townships 7

Fig. 2.1 The temporal x thematic inquiry employed in this research.
Source: author 42
Fig. 3.1 Existing vegetation units 52
Fig. 3.2 Extent of volcanic plains and treeless areas 53
Fig. 4.1 Points on Waark 87
Fig. 4.2 Places on Waark 102
Fig. 5.1 Places and homesteads 157
Fig. 5.2 Places and roads 176
Fig. 5.3 Routes of travellers 177
Fig. 5.4 Places in the landscape 186
Fig. 5.8 Selected runs 234
Fig. 6.2 Municipal areas 1900 276
Fig. 6.3 Road board districts 1863. Source: W.S. Logan, “Local
Government Boundaries,” 1966 277
Fig. 6.4 Railway lines 1900 288
xxiii
xxiv List of Figures
Fig. 6.5 Routes of travellers. Source: H. Cornish, Under the Southern

Cross, 1975; M. Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, 1961; ‘M. Twain’,
Mark Twain, 1973; ‘The Vagabond’, Vagabond Country, 1981;
Jim H. Willis, “Baron von Mueller’s Involvement,” 1988 289
Fig. 6.7 Paintings and places in the landscape 341
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Western story and narrative distinctions and relationships.

Source: author, adapted from Potteiger and Purinton (1998,
11), who adapted it from Chatman (1978, 26), and
re-adapted by the author 27
Table 2.2 Western and aboriginal tangible and intangible story and
narrative distinctions and relationships. Source: author,
adapted from Potteiger and Purinton (1998, 11), who
adapted it from Chatman (1978, 26), and re-adapted by the
author27
Table 2.3 Western landscape narrative typology. Source: author,
adapted from Potteiger and Purinton (1998, 11) 28
Table 2.4 Conceptual country layers. Source: abridged from Nicholson
and Jones (2020, 515), varied by the author 34
Table 2.5 Cross-comparison of the Jones (1993) and Brook (2000)
frameworks. Source: Adapted by the author 40
Table 2.6 The detail of the Jones (1993) thematic framework. Source:
author41
Table 7.1 Thematic mapping and evaluation—pre-colonisation
1800–1840s381
Table 7.2 Thematic mapping and evaluation—colonisation transition
1830s–1870s382
xxv
xxvi List of Tables
Table 7.3 Thematic mapping and evaluation—post-colonisation

1860s–1900382
Table 7.4 Thematic mapping and evaluation—summary 1800–1900 384
Table 7.5 Contemporary 1990s–2020s narratives temporally and
thematically mapped 385
1
Entering the Journey into Genius Loci
1.1 Introduction
In 1870 English colonial author and stockman Adam Lindsay Gordon
(1833–1870), reflecting the embers of past campfires, penned the follow-
ing poetic gaze.
THEY are rhymes rudely strung with intent less

Of sound than of words,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,
And songless bright birds:
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,
Insatiable Summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.
Where in dreariest days, when all dews end,

And all winds are warm,
Wild Winter’s large flood-gates are loosen’d,
And floods, freed by storm,
From broken up fountain heads, dash on
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 1
D. S. Jones, Exploring Place in the Australian Landscape,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_1
2 D. S. Jones
Dry deserts with long pent up passion—

Here rhyme was first framed without fashion,
Song shaped without form. (Robb 1962, 115)
These expressive words embody the confrontational tension about the

Western District in two stanzas within his A Dedication (Robb 1962,
115). His thoughts were but one of thousands of ponderings by new
arrivals about navigating the extensive grassland sea of this new landscape
and translating its nuances, its sensitivities, its sense of place.
Dorothea Mackellar (1885–1968) reinvented this poetic sensibility in
her My Country in 1909, in two of several stanzas quoted below that pos-
sess words emblematic in the Australian psyche today, wherein:
I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!
An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly I. (Mackellar 1918, 59)
Note the unfathomableness in both authors’ voices, the synergistic

dualism of ‘beauty and terror’ and the sense of not being able to explain all.
Genius loci, of sense of place, has challenged many Western narrators
and travellers of generations dating back to and beyond the Roman
Empire. It is a notion that we accept that it exists, we recognise that it can
surface in our thoughts and relationships to place, but we cannot seem to
understand it or quantify it other than contextualising it.
1 Entering the Journey into Genius Loci 3
For many Eastern authors and travellers it is deeply embodied in their

religious traditions and oral histories linked to numinous spirits across
Asia. It is honoured in city pillar shrines, outdoor spirit houses and indoor
household and business shrines; for example, Shinto has its Kami that
incorporates spirits of place, it sits in Dvarapalas and Lokapalas in
Hinduism and is in the Vajrayana and Bonpo traditions.
To Australian Aboriginals, it tangibly resides within ‘Country’, it is
Country, it is Country speaking, but it also is what Country speaks of
and narrates (Rose 1996). Country is not genius loci, but something dif-
ferent. Chapter 2 brings together these distinctly Western and Aboriginal
values and lens in explaining the methodology and the nature of sense
of place.
Thus, sense of place is an easy concept for us to say that it exists and to
discuss its generalities, but genius loci is much more difficult to define,
deconstruct and assess its presence and the variables that characterise its
nuances to humans and place.
1.2 Sense of Place

Exploring Place in the Australian Landscape (2022) considers the nature of
sense of place, its theory and its position in narratives, and explores the
concept in a multi-temporal analysis against the Western District land-
scape of Australia, in the ‘land of the white cockatoo’.1 A bias in this
discussion is naturally towards the place-making/designing disciplines of
landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and architecture,
which are the core users of ‘sense of place’ phrase. Overall the inquiry
comprises an ethno-ecological exploration of the sense of place of the
Western District of Australia, but in another sense it is about offering a
methodological framework to tackle the harder questions beyond simply
saying that a ‘sense of place’ exists here.
The journey within this book is about deconstructing and analysing
the potential constituent themes that resonate within sense of place. But
1
Note, in this book, ‘white cockatoo’ is the generic local name often used for the sulfur-crested
cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), an avian species prolific across the Western District.
4 D. S. Jones
to do it in a methodological approach that enables some measure of

detailed qualitative evaluation to satisfy academic veracity, replicability
and assumption testing expectations. Strategically, the approach is the-
matic, rather than being spatially descriptive, as conventionally applied
in cultural heritage analyses, because themes sit far more comfortably
with narrative typologies and the vertical and horizontal weft that is land-
scape and, as explained in Chap. 2, resonate far more logically with
Aboriginal definitions of Country. Additionally, while the vast majority
of sense of place writings and discourses originate from Western authors,
what is lacking from near all is an appreciation that Eastern and or
Indigenous peoples’ cultural nuances may hold a deeper translation of
sense of place’s tangible and intangible attributes. This includes the
thoughts of authors including Pope (1731, in Hunt and Willis 1988),
Jackson (1984, 1994), Hunt and Willis (1988), Seddon (1972, 1979),
Lippard (1997), Schama (1995), Relph (1976) and Tuan (1977, 1979),
and interesting is nested primarily in the ‘Man and Landscape’
(Seddon and Davis 1976) discourses of the 1970s.
By multi-temporal, I mean casting the inquiry against two human cul-
tures with different values that have and continue to occupy a landscape.
Thus, an extensive portion of this book uniquely considers the Australian
Aboriginal perspective of place, their notions of sense of place and that
which is entailed in within ‘Country’. This is not to say that the answers
to sense of place lie within this realm, but to narrate a different perspec-
tive on the topic, to insert new ways of thinking about the topic and to
offer a way forward to understanding the deeper constitution of sense
of place.
While ‘sense of place’, in terms of its origins, theory and nuances will
be discussed in Chap. 2, some definitions are pertinent at this point.
Like Western academic discussions about sense of place, there are vari-
ations and commonalities, and these are considered in Chap. 2. In
essence, sense of place = the interrelationships between landscape + place
+ culture and how it is thereupon ‘read’ and/or narrated by the reader/
experiencer. Thus, Chap. 2 reviews what is sense of place but also consid-
ers the notions of landscape, place, Country, narration and cultural land-
scape. In part, sense of place is enveloped within the broader concept of
‘cultural landscape’, our human material culture and baggage of values,
but also in the tangible and intangible avenues we express and narrate our
appreciation and celebration of this thought, and a place. This includes
the thoughts of authors including Seddon (1972, 1979), Sauer (1925),
Cronon (1996) and Meinig (1979).
ICOMOS, or the International Council on Monuments and
Sites/Conseil international des monuments et des sites, has more recently
defined sense or ‘spirit’ of place in its Québec Declaration on the Preservation
of the Spirit of Place (2008), as:
Spirit of place is defined as the tangible (buildings, sites, landscapes, routes,

objects) and the intangible elements (memories, narratives, written documents,
rituals, festivals, traditional knowledge, values, textures, colors, odors, etc.),
that is to say the physical and the spiritual elements that give meaning, value,
emotion and mystery to place. Rather than separate spirit from place, the intan-
gible from the tangible, and consider them as opposed to each other, we have
investigated the many ways in which the two interact and mutually construct
one another. The spirit of place is constructed by various social actors, its archi-
tects and managers as well as its users, who all contribute actively and concur-
rently to giving it meaning. Considered as a relational concept, spirit of place
takes on a plural and dynamic character, capable of possessing multiple mean-
ings and singularities, of changing through time, and of belonging to differ-
ent groups.
But this is ‘spirit’ and not ‘sense’.

This cacophony of nouns and adjectives fails to capture the magic of
the Gordon and Mackellar stanzas quoted above, nor the poetic of Epistle
IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington (1735) written by English poet
Alexander Pope (1688–1744). This now much-quoted Epistle IV is cited
at the commencement of Chap. 2. In Epistle IV Pope established that
genius loci was an important principle in garden and landscape design.
Epistle IV laid the foundations for the discipline of landscape architec-
ture, wherein a tenet is ‘that landscape designs should always be adapted
to the context in which they are located’. Thus, to quote Seddon (1979,
72), ‘Analyse the genii loci of our landscapes, and celebrate them’.
Thus, while ICOMOS ‘defines’ what is the scope of sense of place, or
the spirit of place, following in the footsteps of many Western authors,
6 D. S. Jones
and Pope and Seddon instructionally direct us to ‘consult’ and ‘analyse’

the genius loci of a place, no one tells us how to consult being the nature
of ‘talking’ or engagement, or analyse being the process of inquiry, or
guide us as to what are we really looking for in encapsulating the nature
of a place’s sense of place. This book hopefully will go to some way in
adding and answering the latter dilemmas.
1.3 Journey into Landscape

The basis of this book lies in my personal journey and the friendships,
travels and writings I have engaged in over many years. My youth is
nested in the ‘wide brown plains’ of the Newell ‘desert’ that traverses
much of Wiradjuri Country, and holidays on the Mornington Peninsula
of Bunurong Country, in the Western District and in south-east
Queensland, seeing landscape, reading landscape, constantly entreating
my eyes, my imagination and my sensibilities.
Figure 1.1 depicts of the key places in this landscape
From 1984 to 1990 I was actively engaged in designing, explaining,
planning, enlivening and planting about in the Western District much
inspired under Sinatra, but washed with tuitions under Seddon,
McCarthy and Yencken. What was evident was while could ‘talk’ this
landscape, I perceived that I did not fully understand this landscape’s
sensibilities nor were I adequately adept and equipped at reading and
narrating its nuances. Spirn, Rose, McHarg, aided by Seddon and Sinatra,
aided this deep inquiry in 1990–1993. Numerous colleagues and stu-
dents since have asked after this inquiry, have witnessed the breadth and
poetic of my narrations of this place, all wishing to read the depth. A
thread in the Sinatra period was direct exposure to Wurundjeri (Nicholson
and Jones 2020), Goolarabooloo of the Nyigina (Benterrak et al. 1984)
and Gunditjmara Peoples, their Country’s and their values, pre-1990, of
which this continues today widening to long-standing friendships with
Elders and Peoples from these Country’s as well as Peoples from Wiradjuri,
Kaurna, Bunurong and Wadawurrung (Powell et al. 2019) Country’s.
In many ways my post-1993 phase has simply been a continuation and
enhancement of my pre-1990 phase, but only more reflective and deeper,
Fig. 1.1 Landscape features and townships

8 D. S. Jones
and more micro-place specific rather than regional. The reflectivity has
only validated the veracity of the Western District inquiry entertained in
Traces in the Country of the White Cockatoo (Chinna junnak cha knæk gru-
gidj): A Quest for Landscape Meaning in the Western District, Victoria,
Australia (Jones 1993), which was undertaken under the supervision of
Rose, Spirn, Seddon and Sinatra. Thus, Chap. 7 offers a pre- and post-
reflection of the salient points in this inquiry and methodology.
The mental complexity of this place was evident to me every time I
ventured out into the Western District expanse with a colleague.
Journeying chatting in the car, suddenly conversations would come to a
grounding halt when the passenger re-orientated themselves into the
intangible entry gate of this landscape and went quiet with awe. While
their over-whelmingness was palpable, so was their inability to talk, orally
ask questions, as they sat as a car passenger visually surveying this land-
scape trying to find logic in its personality. Thus, an echo of Gordon’s
poetry in a contemporary mind.
With this in mind,
Chapter 1 provides an Introduction to the basis and scope of this
book, introducing ‘sense of place’, raising several questions and charting
the reader’s journey.
Chapter 2 immerses the reader into the nature and narratives associ-
ated with ‘sense of place’ charting definitions, theories, key narrators and
their lens. Included is also the methodological strategy for this research
and discussion, and its multi-disciplinary and multi-temporal strategies.
Chapter 3 takes the reader quickly into the spirit of the Western
District, in a multi-temporal poetic.
Chapter 4 offers a translation of Aboriginal sensibilities to this overall
landscape from 1800 to 1840 explaining many of its associative patterns,
seasonal characteristics, cultural and social nuances and relationships,
and attempting to narrate a multi-Country generational landscape borne
from over 60,000 years of occupancy and care—a ‘calm before the storm’.
Chapter 5 explains the transformative colonisation acts of 1830–1870
that wrought change to this landscape, sought to understand or control
it, attempted to carve new dynastic fiefdoms, of which much of Nature
and respective Aboriginal communities responded to these uninvited
intruders through their own means with both being overtly colonised
and disenfranchised.
Chapter 6 surveys the colonised canvas that unfolded from 1860 to
1900 as the ‘golden fleece’ subjugated the ‘land of the white cockatoo’
and fiefdoms populated the District recasting the landscape in the mirror
of their ancestral homelands in nomenclature, habitat, vegetation, animal
and story.
Chapter 7 considers and synthesises the salient points of the Western
District’s sense of place, explored in Chaps. 3–6, and additionally reflects
upon research and narratives undertaken since 1993 as to
commonalities.
Chapter 8 reflects upon genius loci, and the sense of place of the
Western District landscape, and the concept of sense of place overall
offering conclusions.
1.4 PreCursors for This Journey

The place venue is the landscape of the Western District of Australia.
Possessing the largest volcanic plain in the world and is the youngest vol-
canic plain. It was extensively colonised and ‘laid waste’ to achieve Western
exploitation objectives and ambitions, yet has hosted and continues to
host Aboriginal communities who have resided thereon from some
60,000 Gregorian years back into the Dreaming, or ‘time immemorial’.
As a warning to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers, this
book contains the names of many individuals who have passed into the
Dreaming. Their voices are quoted respectfully, as narrations of their val-
ues and insights pertinent to this inquiry, and their knowledge is deeply
acknowledged and respected. Additionally, places of burial and culturally
sacred places are excluded from the text, for cultural respect reasons,
unless they are in the contemporary public domain in publications co-
authored by or with Country-specific representatives.
As author, I need to acknowledge that pre-contact and post-contact era
Aboriginal voices in this book are drawn from colonial eyes and tran-
scriptions, may as a consequence not represent real-time oral voices nor
perhaps what the actual oral narrator was saying in meaning about a
10 D. S. Jones
landscape, are blinked by the dust of colonial ambition and cultural bag-
gage, can be imperfect and coloured, but at least offer a rich insight to
analyse. The latter research strategy has been tested in contemporary
research by the author and through discussions with many Indigenous
friends and engagements and still holds true.
Further, that being a non-Indigenous Australian I neither can claim to
be an expert in Indigenous Knowledge Systems nor have the right to nar-
rate such as an expert or Indigenous representative or delegate. Rather,
the text within is scaffolded and synergised from the voices of others,
including and specifically Indigenous peoples as much as possible espe-
cially when relevant.
Additionally, the reader needs to recognise that the word and term
‘Aboriginal’ is a Western-contrived word that became a generic term.
Mischievously, it is an act of colonisation in its own right, as it disenfran-
chises and disguises the over 250 Indigenous Country’s and Nations
whose peoples oversaw, and still today oversee, the custodianship of this
continent’s lands, waters, seas, skies and its bowels. So, Country and clans
names are used throughout where Country specific or clan specific, in
preference to ‘Aboriginal’. Thus, the ‘Western District’ nomenclature and
space is a derivative of colonial explorer Thomas Mitchell’s ‘Australia
Felix’, and belies Gunditjmara, Djap Wurrung, Gulidjan, Gadubanud,
Wadawurrung Peoples then and today.
Referencing in Chaps. 3–6 has been condensed due to publication
limitations, the bibliography remains intact and updated, and the fine-
grain detailed referencing is in Jones (1993) to aid researchers.
References
Benterrak, K, S Muecke & P Roe (1984), Reading the Country: Introduction to
Nomadology. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Cronon, W (1996), Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature.
New York: WW Norton & Co.
Hunt, JD & P Willis (eds) (1988), The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape
Garden 1620–1820. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackson, JB (1984), Discovering the vernacular landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press
Jackson, JB (1994), A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. New Haven, CT, Yale
University Press.
Jones, DS (1993), Traces in the Country of the White Cockatoo (Chinna junnak
cha knæk grugidj): A Quest for Landscape Meaning in the Western District,
Victoria, Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Lippard, LR (1997), The lure of the local: Senses of place in a multicentred society.
New York: The New Press
Mackellar, D (1918), My Country: A Poem by Dorothea Mackellar with
Decorations and Illustrations by J.J. Hilder, Sydney 1915, in The
Art of J.J. Hilder, Smith and B. Stevens (eds.), p. 28. Sydney, NSW: Angus &
Robertson.
Meinig, DW (1979), The Beholding Eye Ten Versions of the Same Scene in The
Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, DW Meinig and
JB Jackson (eds.), pp. 33-48. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nicholson, M & DS Jones (2020), Wurundjeri-al Narrm-u (Wurundjeri’s
Melbourne): Aboriginal living heritage in Australia’s urban landscapes in KD
Silva (ed.) Routledge Handbook on Historic Urban Landscapes of the Asia-
Pacific, pp. 508-525. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Powell, B, D Tournier, DS Jones and PB Roös (2019), Welcome to Wadawurrung
Country, in DS Jones & PB Roös (eds.), Geelong’s Changing Landscape:
Ecology, Development and Conservation, pp. 44-84. Melbourne, Vic: CSIRO
Publishing.
Relph, E (1976), Place and Placelessness. London, UK: Pion.
Robb, FM (ed.) (1962), The Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Melbourne, Vic:
Oxford University Press, 1946; reprint, 1962.
Rose, DB (1996), Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape
and wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission.
Sauer, CO (1925), The Morphology of Landscape, University of California
Publications in Geography 2: 19-53.
Schama, S (1995), Landscape and memory. London, UK: Fontana.
Seddon, G (1972), Sense of Place: a Response to an Environment, the Swan
Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Perth: University of Western Australia Press.
Seddon, G (1979), The Genius Loci and Australian landscape, Landscape
Australia 2: 66-73.
12 D. S. Jones
Seddon, G & M Davis (eds.) (1976), Man and landscape in Australia: towards an
ecological vision: Papers from a symposium held at the Australian Academy of
Science, Canberra, 30 May-2 June 1974. Canberra, ACT: Australian
Government Publishing Service.
Tuan, Y-F (1977), Space and Place. London, UK: Edward Arnold.
Tuan, Y-F (1979), Landscapes of Fear. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
2
Place, Country, and Genius Loci
In 1731, poet Alexander Pope made genius loci an important principle in

garden and landscape design with the following often quoted lines (from
Hunt and Willis 1990, 212) from Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of
Burlington (1731).
To build, to plant, whatever you intend,

To rear the Column or the Arch to bend,
To swell the Terras or to sink the Grot;
In all, let Nature never be forgot.
Consult the Genius of the Place in all;
That tells the Waters to rise, or fall;
Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the Heav’ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling Theatres the Vale;
Calls in the Country, catches opening Glades,
Joins willing Woods, and varies Shades from Shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th’ intending Lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, Designs.
One could also write, reminiscing about the Western District landscape:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_2
14 D. S. Jones
15th February 1949.

On one wall of my grandfather’s library was a large vertical canvas that I
always gazed at before returning to boarding school. A captivating scene of
grandeur and simplicity, it depicted the homestead pools, the house nestled in
an oasis setting, flocks grazing and the hills beyond, all in a bucolic late after-
noon light. The image stuck in my mind as the symbol of endless summer holi-
days and as a picturesque misrepresentation of the truth of the landscape spirit.
Looking around that dark but warm room, with its blackwood shelving
laden with musty books, only two other things caught my eye. Sunlight always
streamed through one window creating a faded mark on the Turkish carpet.
The light was brilliant and intense. Dust particles swirled in its veil as if the
spirits of the landscape were trying to invest their control upon this bluestone
fortress. Above the large ornate carved oak fireplace mantel a large faded map,
framed in stained blackwood, always caught my eye but not my reach. Victoria
was charted out, station runs delineated, chains of mountains snaked east-west,
and telegraph and railway lines fed inland like dendritic hands from port
townships. The image was of a conquered and named space, an antechamber
county of England that was anonymous in our school history texts. Holding a
central position in the room, it was personalized by greasy accretions at loca-
tions that held special meaning to my grandfather.
Both contain abstractions and signal meanings of place nested in a

distinct terrestrial place that possesses tangibility of resonance and focus,
but also subtle unknowns as to the intangibilities of the same terrestrial
place in the narratives; such is the nature of genius loci through
Western eyes.
2.1 Introduction
To understand and appreciate the genius loci of place is to enter into a
complex philosophical realm of Western writings; one that many disci-
plines—from geography to social science to architecture to landscape
architecture to anthropology—have all separately entered into at the
same as seeking to learn from past authorship explorations. These writ-
ings have evolved, wavered, postulated, and struggled to offer a frame-
work to aid the reader and the translator seeking to conserve a place’s
2 Place, Country, and Genius Loci 15
tangible, intangible, and metaphysical qualities and meanings. Thus, a

holistic experiential translation approach, including psychic, physical,
and human components, is required to consider the duality of genius loci
being both a reality and an entity. This shift of inquiry lens positions
merit upon the intangible qualities of a place, envisaged both physically
and spiritually, and ‘reading’ its narrative revelations through visible tan-
gible and perceived non-material features.
Such an approach recognises the underlying processes present, wherein
genius loci possesses temporality as a process as well atemporality as a
point in time. It is significant in terms of being both the mediator and
medium of social interactions. Such echoes Ricoeur’s articulation of
‘human time’ in Temps et Récit (Time and Narrative) (1983), in explain-
ing that we experience time in two different ways. One is a linear succes-
sion, like the passage of hours and days and the journey of our human
lives from birth to death, being cosmological time that Ricoeur calls
metaphorically the ‘river’ of time. The second is phenomenological time
that we interpret as past, present, and future. Thus, as self-aware humans,
we experience time as a linear succession, but also successionally in terms
of what has been, what is, and what will be. Ricoeur’s (1983) concept of
‘human time’ is expressive of a complex experience in which phenomeno-
logical time and cosmological time are integrated (Atkins 2021). Ricoeur
has argued that conventionally these two conceptions of time have tradi-
tionally been seen in opposition, but instead that they should be interwo-
ven because they share a relation of mutual presupposition. The order of
‘past-present-future’ within phenomenological time presupposes the suc-
cession characteristic of cosmological time. Ricoeur ascribes anchoring
time as the ‘inscription’ of phenomenological time on cosmological time,
and thus a place in a point in time embodying multiple narratives and
meanings (Atkins 2021; Ricoeur 1983 III, 109).
Genius loci derives from Latin to explain the dwelling god. The phrase
accordingly enveloped the space where the god was located, and thereby
was mythic, symbolic, and magic in its attributes resonant across spaces
found in different cultures and civilisations. Loh argues that place in his-
toric sites encompasses meanings accrued through time and past and pres-
ent uses as intangible values expressed in tangible built heritage, thereby
excluding heritage where natural heritage that embodies the intangible.
16 D. S. Jones
‘Place’ has a character and attributes, which distinguish it from other

places and ‘lend to its unique presence or genius loci’ (Loh 2007, 7).
Conventionally, it is concluded that it is genius loci that makes each
place unique as expressed by the embodiment of cultural attributes in
different textures, forms, and meanings to any environment (Karaman
2007). From Karaman’s perspective, place is a cultural artefact that reveals
how one or more human actions have transformed and characterised a
place they reside in, engraved into the landscape, thus assuming atempo-
rality and not interwoven time as ascribed by Ricoeur (1983). Considerable
writings and thoughts, across many nations and Western cultures, have
therefore pondered genius loci theory, with a few venturing towards pro-
viding some identification or evaluative framework to aid the reader, the
researcher, and the ponderer. Such is characterised by a multiplicity and
a multidimensionality of theoretical approaches and theories in philoso-
phy, human geography, architecture, landscape architecture, cultural
anthropology, and so on, spread across a very wide spectrum from the
physicality of a place to human sense-based perceptions to human spiri-
tual experiences and intangible interactions, all validating that there exists
a relationship between spatial and social processes (Markeviciene 2012).
This chapter charts a large portion of these ponderings taking the
reader summatively first into much of the philosophical ponderings and
musings, before secondly looking at the Western interpretation and read-
ing of landscape. The latter has been borne out of different languages, the
artistic arts, before finding its footing and resonance in landscape archi-
tecture and place designing itself. The third section enters into ‘uncharted
lands’ for many readers, journeying the reader into the Australian
Aboriginal notion of genius loci or rather Country, before concluding with
some thoughts as to how to cross-culturally proceed.
2.2 Navigating the Western Philosophy

of Genius
In Western writings, genius loci embodies and explains the intangible val-
ues of a place. In this inquiry, we are more concerned about the close
relationship between place and genius loci, as distinct from concepts and
discourses, including spirit of place, space, landscape (as environment

perceived), or environment.
Place and genius loci live within a co-dependent relationship. To trans-
late genius loci, one quickly reaches for the physicality of place—its tan-
gible structure(s)—linked to implicit familiarisation and intuitive
associations; losing a feature of this place results in the destruction of its
tangibility dimension but not in human memory at an individual or col-
lective level resulting in emotional loss or place-depression from The Past
Is a Foreign Country as explained by Lowenthal (1985), and also echoed
by Eliade (1961). Significantly, Western authors assume that genius loci
signifies a temporal process that is dynamic and not consciously crafted
therein fulfilling a role as a mediator and as a vehicle of social interactions.
Conventionally many geographers resist the translation of place’s
archaeology as possessing evidence of either social, cultural, or natural
forces. Geographer Carl Sauer in The Morphology of Landscape (1925)
ignited the English-speaking world’s use of the phrase cultural landscapes,
arguing that geography possessed phenomenological foundations
whereby ‘every field of knowledge is characterized by its declared preoc-
cupation with a certain group of phenomena’, should not be distracted
by its traditional study of areal knowledge or landscapes or chorology,
because ‘within each landscape there are phenomena that are not simply
there but are either associated or independent of each other’. Thus, the
geographer’s task was to translate its conventional analysis of a critical
system to embrace ‘the phenomenology of landscape, in order to grasp in
all of its meaning and colour the varied terrestrial scene’ (Sauer 1925, 20,
21, 25). Cresswell (2004), Sack (1997), and Casey (1996) similarly argue
for the geography discipline to understand the fundamental role of place
in human life perceiving that human society is inconceivable without
place. Similarly, Malpas (1999, 35–36) observes, ‘It is within the struc-
ture of place that the very possibility of the social arises’. Their threads are
that genius loci need to be translated as the intersection of place to human
perception and sensation. Such draws upon our deep psychological root-
edness in our physical and emotional experiences and pre-conceived
knowledges echoing Gadamer’s hermeneutic perspective wherein ‘lan-
guage is the universal horizon of hermeneutic experience [and …] that
the hermeneutic experience is itself universal’ (Malpas 2018). Accordingly,
18 D. S. Jones
place needs to be experienced because ‘there is no knowing or sensing a

place except by being in that place, and to be in a place is to be in a posi-
tion to perceive it’ (Casey 1996, 18), and therefore places are emotional
identities, having a soul (Hillmann 2004). This philosophical argument
bodes interesting relevance when considered in Aboriginal thought, but
the flaw in this discussion is the Western assumption that one experiences
place from being within it, whereas in Aboriginal culture, one experi-
ences a place within, or via song wherever one is located, or from afar in
story, so one does not have to be physically in a place to experience and
tell of one’s perceptions and intimate sensory responses and
relationships.
Places therefore can possess a voice, an emotion, and an existential
meaning. They are, according to Foucault’s (quote in Barnes 2004, 573;
see Foucault 1967) argument, ‘heterotopia’s difference, its incommensu-
rability with its surroundings, marks it as a place of potential intellectual
innovation, for reordering the order of things, or, as I will argue later, for
reordering the geography of geography’. Thus, ‘Places are not abstract,
static, self-contained sites, sealed by rigid boundaries, but material,
dynamic, open, and defined by their interrelationships with other places.
If they were not, they could not function as sites of intellectual produc-
tion’ (Barnes 2004, 591). They are in fact ‘cultural subjects, they “speak”
about the long process of “anthropisation” through the landscape, they
give back/return identity, memory, language, material cultures, symbolic
and affective messages’ (Magnaghi 2004, 54). Genius loci therefore creates
a distinct environmental character expressive of an atmosphere, which
crafts a particular relationship with a human organising that human’s
atmosphere and affections and physical sensations and psychological
emotions (Barbalet 1998). As Relph (1976, 33), explains, ‘Place itself is
the present expression of past experience and events and of hopes for the
future’.
With the passage of ponderings, place has attracted an animistic nature
enriched by different values and meanings that represent different layers
that have settled over time. Therefore, genius loci can be considered an
‘assemblage’ of tangible and intangible elements possessive of sensory
temporal and atemporal qualities. As Massey (1995, 188–190) writes,
It may be useful to think of places, not as areas on maps; but as constantly

shifting articulations of social relations through time; and to think of par-
ticular attempts to characterise them as an attempt to define, and claim
coherence and a particular meaning for, specific envelopes of space-time.
Thus, Vecco (2020) argues that genius loci should be interpreted as a

meta-concept because it is constructed of different layers and that each
layer contributes a unique and difference dimension of significance. Such
layers include (biological, social, environmental, physical, and human
dimensions) constituted of: (1) a visible and tangible material layer; (2)
the invisible experience of the place created in the human mind; and (3)
the underlying processes of human and natural activity with all interrela-
tions between them. Such constructs a phenomenon that explains the
intrinsic and extrinsic nature of genius loci. Again, this discussion bodes
relevance to Aboriginal culture and Country. This approach permits us to
contrast and combine more subjective and objective perspectives on
places, respecting their underlying factors. In this context, the socio-
economic, cultural dynamics, and natural processes can be identified as
the main underlying factors. Values and preferences represent the intan-
gible layer while the appearance of the place is the visible tangible layer.
Therefore, to translate the genius loci of place requires a multidimen-
sional holistic approach because the whole is more than the sum of its
parts. Change one variable in place and you change a relationship and
this results in a change in the system as a whole. Antrop (2000) explains,
through an ecological lens, the structural consequences are (1) dependent
upon the relativity of the element’s non-absolute value, (2) changing the
element also changes the whole, and (3) changing the context can imply
a change of the quality of this included element.
Much of these writings reflect a literary phenomenological shift that
investigated and sought to explain the nature of our lived experience and
the manner in which it is represented in our experience of place, and
thereupon its influence upon our maturation and sustenance as an indi-
vidual and as a cultural identity vehicle. European, and particularly the
French Annales tradition, originating from the philosophical writings of
Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty, underpin much of the
contemporary writings on place and landscape. Husserl’s
20 D. S. Jones
conceptualisation of the lifeworld, as rephrased by Abram (1996, 40) as

‘the world of our immediately lived experience’ in its ‘enigmatic multi-
plicity and open-endedness, prior to conceptually freezing it into a static
space of “facts”’, has aided this discussion. Heidegger offered a strategy of
what it meant to dwell in a place, to make a home, and the role of inter-
pretation and language in this strategy. Merleau-Ponty explained percep-
tion and embodiment in sensing the web of relationships that make up
the world; a world made up of places of which people are an integral part.
This explains the logic that argues ‘the sense of place, as the phrase sug-
gests, does indeed emerge from the senses. The land, and even the spirit
of the place, can be experienced kinetically, or kinesthetically’, as explained
by Lippard (1997, 34). Therefore, through the vehicle of our overall
body, we engage with and talk to place. We need to understand our
empathy with place, unburden it of our rationalistic tenets, and offer a
… willingness to be open to significances of a place, to feel it, to know and

respect its symbols. … This involves not merely looking at a place, but see-
ing into and appreciating the essential elements of its identity … To be
inside a place empathetically is to understand that place as rich in meaning,
and hence to identify with it. (Relph 1976, 54)
2.3 Navigating the Landscape of Genius

North American landscape anthropologist and historian JB Jackson has
written that
‘Sense of place’ is a much used expression, chiefly by architects but taken

over by urban planners and interior decorators and the promoters of con-
dominiums, so that now it means very little. It is an awkward and ambigu-
ous translation of the Latin term genius loci. In classical times it means not
so much the place itself as the guardian divinity of that place … in the
eighteenth century the Latin phrase was usually translated as ‘the Genius of
a place’, meaning its influence … We now use the current version to
describe the atmosphere to a place, the quality of its environment.
Nevertheless, we recognize that certain localities have an attraction which
gives us a certain indefinable sense of well-being and which we want to
return to, time and again. (Jackson, 1994, 157–158)
Genius loci is contemporary and continuing notion in Western writ-

ings that is particularly prevalent in the built environment and arts disci-
plines, including landscape architecture and landscape design.
Norwegian architectural theorist Norberg-Schulz (1971, 1980, 1985)
has talked of its associations in Greek mythology. His narrative was that
Greek gods symbolised the ‘various roles and interactions of man on
earth’ and thus humanistically defined particular kinds of places and nar-
rated these places in terms of their human characteristics. By celebrating
a place in the representation to a specific god, the Greeks articulated an
equal juxtaposition of place possessing deity and an aspect of humanity.
The Romans thereupon replicated this notion concluding that places,
like people, had inner spirits that determined their (and thus a place’s)
essences and characteristics. In this logic, one could thereby read a place’s
character, spirit, and values in the same way that one reads the particu-
larities of a human face and the respective human personality. Thus, both
the Greeks and Romans perceived that the ‘genius of a place’ could be
defined by interpreting its individual features. This approach mirrors
Animism in its belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess distinct
and definable spiritual essences. Animism is a belief system based upon a
supernatural power that structures and animates the material universe,
and this belief system underpins many Asian and First Nation’s cultures
and societal relationships to place features today.
De Saussure (1995) ascribes place as the significier (in French signifi-
ant) that is codified and accepted, thus signified (in French signifié). From
de Saussure’s perspective place is an open, in fieri, and a concept that is
continuously rebuilding itself in our minds when we hear or read the
signifier. Norberg-Schulz argues that genius loci has a fundamental func-
tion in place-making and that such resides in the philosophical idea of
phenomenology, in particular referring to the ‘phenomenology of archi-
tecture’ in his writings. In his opinion, place is a ‘psychic’ function,
dependent upon identification, and that such implies a sense of human
belongingness (Norberg-Schulz 1980, 166). Drawing upon Heidegger’s
essay Building Dwelling Thinking (1995), Norberg-Schulz (1980, 5)
argues that ‘man dwells when he can orientate himself and identify him-
self with an environment, or; when he experiences the environment as
meaningful’. The discourse footnote is that Norberg-Schulz (2000a, b)
22 D. S. Jones
later rejected its phenomenological implications and emphasised the

ontological essence of a place being the integration of human existence
with place.
By the eighteenth century, the English Landscape School had appro-
priated the concept of genius loci as their central tenet, drawing upon its
use in period literature and writings including the often-cited Pope quo-
tation earlier. Thus, it became a mainstay of Western, and primarily the
English-speaking, world’s theories about place and place-making from
this period.
Contemporary landscape-interested authors have explored this con-
cept from different lens, but the majority agree that ‘space, landscape and
place are clearly highly interrelated terms and each definition is contested’
(Cresswell 2004, 12). A large portion of these authors, including Convery
et al. (2012), Hunt and Willis (1988), Jackson (1994), Meinig (1979),
Norberg-Schulz (1980), and Seddon (1972, 1979), have specifically
explored genius loci in its entirety recognising both tangible and intangi-
ble attributes and values. Extracting closer investigations, authors includ-
ing Alanen and Melnick (2000), Cullen (1961), McHarg (1969), Relph
(1976), Schama (1995), and Tuan (1977) have concentrated on the phys-
ical tangible attributes of place, although Tuan acknowledges that hidden
meanings exist in place and Lippard (1998) has considered localised
meanings and values. Thus, landscapes + places + cultures are interwoven
in the weft of a tapestry that is dynamic and not static in its constitution.
In this sense, remembering that we are talking about a Western lens,
every place is constituted from ongoing natural and cultural phenomena,
interactions of which humans (physically and intellectually) are but one
agent in these interactions, and that are one body that narrates and per-
ceives changes in the metaphorical footprint of the landscape. Thus,
landscape historian Cronon (1996, 22) writes,
The material nature we inhabit and the ideal nature we carry in our heads
exist always in complex relationship with each other, and we will misun-
derstand both ourselves and the world if we fail to explore that relationship
in all its rich and contradictory complexity.
From all these writings, landscape is perceived and read through con-
temporary Western eyes as a dynamic cultural landscape artefact, an
expression of humanity’s conscious or vernacular ‘designed landscape’.
Such mirrors Sauer’s (1963, 343) much-quoted definition that ‘the cul-
tural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group.
Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural land-
scape the result’. But event before Sauer, authors were articulating defini-
tional inquiries about the nature of a ‘cultural landscape’. The notion first
resonates in the European tradition of landscape painting where many
European artists painted landscapes in favour of people, squeezing people
into minority roles in their paintings enveloped within specific land-
scapes. Such reflects the origins of the word landscape that merges land,
with the Germanic verb of scapjan/schaffen to mean ‘shaped lands’. In this
historical linguistic use, lands were then interpreted as being shaped by
natural forces with their unique details or characteristics—landshaffen
(shaped lands)—evolving into being the focus of ‘landscape’ paintings.
While the genesis of the term ‘cultural landscape’ lies in the scope first
expressed by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel in the 1890s as ‘land-
scape modified by human activity’ (Jones 2003), it was German geogra-
pher Otto Schlüter, in 1908, attributed as first using the phrase ‘cultural
landscape’ as an academic term in the early twentieth century and that
there was a need for a Landschaftskunde (landscape science), which would
position geography as a separate discipline. His argument split landscape
into two types: (a) the Urlandschaft (transl. ‘original landscape’) or a land-
scape of pre-major human induced changes; and (b) the Kulturlandschaft
(transl. ‘cultural landscape’) being a landscape created by human culture
(Bharatdwaj 2009, 6; James and Martin 1981, 177).
Hashemnezhad et al. (2013, 7) have recently written:
Sense of place is the relationship between man, his image and environmental
characteristics. This concept on the one hand is rooted in subjective experience
of people (memories, traditions, history, culture, and society) and in other hand
is affected from objective and external influences of the environment (land-
scape, smell, sound) that these lead to various association of a place. So sense of
place is a complex concept of emotion and attachment to the human environ-
ment which is created from people adoption and use of places.
24 D. S. Jones
But, a warning. The way we view and read landscape is influenced by

our values and cultural baggage, and thus it disguises as much as it reveals.
Thus, the colonisers of the North American, African, and Australasian
landscapes experienced blinkered legibility, uncertainty, insecurity, anxi-
ety, and depression of Landscapes of Fear (Tuan 1979), as they strode
forth trying to lift the purple veil that misted each landscape. The veil was
palpable, lacking a guidebook. Thus, as Wylie (2005, 242) has written,
‘Sublime experience is predicated upon an initial fracture that places
observer and observed on either side of an abyss. And just as the sublime
beholder dissolves in dreadful delight, so he or she simultaneously under-
goes an energizing apotheosis: the event of vision begins and ends with a
cleaving apart of subject and world’. Similarly, Seddon (1997, 105–106)
has observed ‘that “sense of place” has become a popular concept, heard
at every turn, unanalysed, and this is, for me, a problem. … It can [thus]
be a way of legitimising a set of personal and subjective evaluative criteria
as if they had some externally derived authority’.
Western grammatical uses of phrases, including ‘primeval land before
time’, are at odds with the contemporary ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ land-
scapes as advanced by Sauer (1925, 1963), Jackson (1984, 1994), and
Meinig (1979) because these latter authors talk of post-colonised land-
scapes. For example, Meinig (1979) talks of seeing landscapes through
the lens of: Nature—amidst all this man is minuscule, superficial, ephem-
eral, subordinate; Habitat—what we see before us is man continuously
working at a viable relationship with nature; Artefact—the earth is a plat-
form, but all thereon is furnished with man’s effects so extensively that
you cannot find a scrap of pristine nature; System—such a mind sees a
river not as a river, but as a link in the hydrologic circuit; Problem—the
evidence looms in almost any view, eroded hills, flooding rivers, shattered
woods; Wealth—the eyes of an appraiser, assigning a monetary value to
everything in view; Ideology—the whole scene as a symbol of values, the
governing ideas, the underlying philosophies of a culture; History—a
complex cumulative record of nature and man; Place—every landscape is
a locality, an individual piece in the infinitely varied mosaic of the earth;
and Aesthetic—that there is something close to the essence, of beauty and
truth, in the landscape. Accordingly, in Meinig’s opinion, landscape,
then, has powerful physical, environmental, economic, cultural, psycho-

logical, and aesthetic components. In all these discussions, the material
earth is narrated as existing, as being always and as being subservient to
human interpretation of a place. Thus nature, wilderness, landscape, and
even place are just more examples of a vast range of intellectual linguistic
constructions that are readily pliable, reinvented, reimagined, and repro-
jected to label, validate, or re-explain an empty place before us. Such
makes for easy expropriation of place as an intellectual colonisation act
and not just a physical colonisation act (Gammage 2011; Seddon 1997).
In contrast, Australian Aboriginals perceive place as a part, or multi-
layer and multi-dimension space with undefined scale and temporality, as
being a venue within their metaphorical realm and therefore it is not
simply a landscape under Western definitions. Their concept of ‘Country’,
discussed further, therefore envelopes a much wider ‘definition’ of place.
Echoing the kernel of this realm, Taylor (2008, 1) has written:
Landscape therefore is not simply what we see, but a way of seeing: we see it
with our eye but interpret it with our mind and ascribe values to landscape for
intangible—spiritual—reasons. Landscape can therefore be seen as a cultural
construct in which our sense of place and memories in here.
This sentiment echoes Hoskins’ (1955, 14) plea for ‘research’ in the
field because ‘the … landscape itself, to those who know how to read it
aright is the richest historical record we possess’, and a tone that Jackson
(1951, 3) repeated later writing later in his inaugural issue of Landscape
that ‘a rich and beautiful book is always open before us. We have but to
learn how to read it’. In later years, Lowenthal (1975, 12) reinforced this
plea, observing, ‘It is the landscape as a whole—that largely manmade
tapestry, in which all other artefacts are embedded … which gives them
their sense of place [sic]’.
A core thread in these discussions is the way and manner we ‘write’ and
‘read’, as that is the conventional Western instrument of our values and
mental images. Writing, whether text or oral or paint or design express,
comprises narratives of human hand and or imagination. Such expres-
sions are informed by our values, our cultural baggage, and the context in
which such reside and ‘painted’.
26 D. S. Jones
Narratives are and therefore can be landscapes. In this sense, stories,

narratives, explanations, text, song, story, voice, meaning ‘narrate’,
whether they be in an oral or non-oral mode(s) or via voice or non-voice
that is computed to Western language and text. For Potteiger and
Purinton (1998), Landscape Narratives embody a responsive relationship
and engagement between place + human + animal + time. Landscape
designs, or master plans, textual histories, and so on, are all dependent
upon a ‘reading’ of place and its resources, its contextualisation. ‘Reading’
or rather ‘reading [the] Country’ (Benterrak et al. 1996) is a very apt
explanation of the four-dimensional immersion one needs to partake to
understand, listen to, talk to, feel empathy with, embrace, walk through,
reside upon and gather foods within, which explains a First Nation’s rela-
tionship to the Western word ‘narrative’ as echoed by Rose (1996, 7)
mentioned earlier in the text. Thus, as humans, whether Western or
Wadawurrung, we ‘write’ narratives (whether fiction or non-fiction), sto-
ries, songs, and myths, and we use these to locate ourselves in time, place,
community, and meaning. Potteiger and Purinton (1998) point to
Barthes (1997, 79) who explains that ‘the narratives of the world are
numberless’. They can be
… carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images,

gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in
myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime,
painting, stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation,
cultural back grounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad
literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply
there, like life itself.
For the Wadawurrung Peoples of Victoria in Australia, an Australian

Aboriginal First Nation’s community, their narratives possess a collage
tapestry of sites, accretions of history, possessing patterns and sequences,
and venues to which they physically and or mentally engage with and
respond to their attributes and qualities and the processes (Powell et al.
2019; Powell and Jones 2018). Thus, as humans, whether Western or
Wadawurrung, ‘write’ narratives (whether fiction or non-fiction), stories,
songs, and myths, we use these to locate ourselves in time, place, com-
munity, and meaning.
Table 2.1 Western story and narrative distinctions and relationships. Source:
author, adapted from Potteiger and Purinton (1998, 11), who adapted it from
Chatman (1978, 26), and re-adapted by the author
Strategy Form Shape Types
Narrative Story Content Events, characters, settings
Telling Expression Verbal, dance, landscape, film, manifestation
Table 2.2 Western and aboriginal tangible and intangible story and narrative
distinctions and relationships. Source: author, adapted from Potteiger and
Purinton (1998, 11), who adapted it from Chatman (1978, 26), and re-adapted by
the author
Strategy Structure Form Shape Types
Narrative Western human Story Content Events, characters, settings
tangible Telling Expression Voice, dance, landscape,
spiritual manifestations
First Nation Story Content Events, characters, settings
human tangible Telling Expression Voice, dance, landscape,
Western human Story Content Poetics, sounds, events,
intangible characters, settings
Telling Expression Voices, patterns, landscape,
First Nation Story Content Poetics, voices, sounds,
human events, characters, settings
intangible Telling Expression Poetics, voices, patterns,
landscape, spiritual
manifestations
To explain, Table 2.1 summarises Western story and narrative distinc-

tions and relationships, and Table 2.2 summarises Western and Aboriginal
tangible and intangible story and narrative distinctions and relationships.
Table 2.3 summarises Potteiger and Purinton’s (1998, 11) translation of
the Western landscape narrative typology.
In taking this discussion one step forward, the translation of genius
loci ‘designing’ has been recognised by several landscape architect authors.
Seddon (1979) argued, in the 1970s, that we respect what he terms the
‘genius loci’, that is, the intrinsic elements of the space, most notably the
ecology, geology, landform, soil, and vegetation—and last, the cultural
landscape (Powell 1979). In terms of Australia’s landscape architecture
28 D. S. Jones
Table 2.3 Western landscape narrative typology. Source: author, adapted from
Potteiger and Purinton (1998, 11)
Landscape
narrative type Typology explanation
Narrative Place narratives associated with routines, rituals, or events
experiences
Associations and Place narratives associated experience, event, history,
experiences religious allegory, and so on
Memory Place narratives associated that serve as the locus of
landscapes memory, both public and personal
Narrative setting Place narratives associated that enable defined settings for
and topos a narrative; for example, mountaintops, waterfalls,
springs, and chance meetings that take place on the road
Genres of Place narratives associated by culturally defined stories or
landscape genres
narratives
Processes Place narratives associated with natural actions or events
caused by some agency (wind, water, economics) that
occur in succession or proceed in stages towards some end
(progress; entropy)
Interpretive Place narratives associated that tell what happened in a
landscapes place
Narrative as form Place narratives associated that offer a means of giving
generation order (selecting, sequencing. etc.) or in developing images
in the design process
Storytelling Place narratives associated that celebrate specific stories
landscapes with explicit references to plot, scenes, events, character,
and so on
discipline, Seddon also argued that the discipline is ‘immature in several

respects and which relate to boundary problems: the proper realm of
discourse is ill-defined and its professional identity is insecure’, and such
typifies Wulff’s (1987a, b) attempts at an Australian design style typology
where genius loci is absent less its tenuous possibilities within his
‘Dreamtime/Ethereal’ category. This type is defined as the following:
‘This style attempts to appreciate the vast, undefined and limitless
Australian landscape … These unusual characteristics tend to be abstracted
as a mental/psychological appreciation in design solutions rather than as
a physical manifestation’. Taylor (2013, 223, 298), of the practice Taylor
Cullity Lethlean (TCL), explained his personal design ethos as:
Sense captures my deep intuition for country, community and site. It encapsu-
lates my sensitivity to people and to landscape and my ability to make sense of
place, understanding its rhythms, its environments and its secrets and therefore
his acknowledgement that a design process necessarily distils, abstracts and styl-
ises and that the public may only connect with partially, subliminally or not at
all, and that all that is understood is that the design is driven by a designers
coherent sense of place … [and thus] treads a fine line between literal and
abstract and between nostalgic and obtuse.
In North America, Daniel and Vining (1983) categorised the act as

being ‘Phenomenological’ involving
greater emphasis on individual subjective feelings, expectations, and inter-

pretations. Landscape perception is conceptualized as an intimate encoun-
ter between a person and the environment. The person brings many things
to this encounter, including an environmental history, a particular personal
context for the encounter, a special sensitivity and openness to the environ-
ment, and a particular set of intentions and motivations for being in that
p1ace at that time.
Zube et al. (1982) similarly have categorised this ‘art of designing’ for
sense of place as be enveloped into their ‘experiential paradigm’ whereby
‘this considers landscape values to be based on the experience of the
human-scape interaction, whereby both are shaping and being shaped in
the interactive process’. More recently, Trieb (1995) has categorised this
approach of designing, ‘The Genius of the Place’, as involving
the worship of the Genius of the Place … to consult the spirit of the place
as a means of rooting landscape design in a particular locale … The pres-
ence of the genius is a bit more obvious in undisturbed land, but there is
precious little of that around these days; the genius is hardly unaffected by
changes in atmosphere and climate. Still, the genius provides major sup-
port for landscape design and its rationalization today.
The caveat to this discussion about ‘designing’ is that, from Relph’s

(1993, 103), perspective, ‘genius loci cannot be designed to order. It has
to evolve, to be allowed to happen, to grow and change from the direct
efforts of these who live and work in place and care about them’.
30 D. S. Jones
2.4 Navigating Country [of Genius]

Genius loci does not exist as a phrase or as a concept in Aboriginal lan-
guages. Country is not genius loci. It should not be confused as possessing
all the traits and values of genius loci through an Aboriginal lens.
Genius loci is a colonial term possessing a lack of comparability in
Aboriginal languages, of which the closest translation might be the term
‘Country’ that is used commonly across Australia by First Nations
peoples.
In navigating First Nation Australia, a comprehension of the terms
‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Country’ is essential, but also that ‘Language’ cannot be
dislocated from Country. Aboriginal, First Nation, and Indigenous are
three terms of reference that have been given to the First People of the
Australian continent, none of these are self-identifying. Therefore, to
define an identity that has been given by others, and that includes many
proves difficult in a Western sense. Many today identify by their Language
Group name when identifying on an individual level, but on a general
level as any of the three.
The term ‘Aborigine’ is principally a noun in English grammar. Derived
etymologically from the Latin aborīginēs, in plural, it was originally used
to describe the ‘original inhabitants of a country (spec. a race of pre-
Roman inhabitants of Italy), original founders of a city’ or ‘the people or
race which first inhabited Latium in Italy’, and thus the adverb ab orīgine.
The singular form aborigine evolved from ‘the English plural in the nine-
teenth century by analogical removal of final –s’. In 1724, Sewell used it
to describe ‘a member of an ethnic group inhabiting or occupying a
country before the arrival of European colonists and those whom they
introduced’, but it is now usually used with the initial capital ‘A’ being ‘A
member of any of the numerous indigenous Australian peoples; an
Australian Aboriginal’ (OED Online 2021a). The adjective ‘Aboriginal’
has the same origins and grammatical origins, referring to the ‘First or
earliest as recorded by history; present from the beginning; primitive. Of
peoples, plants, and animals: inhabiting or existing in a land from earliest
times; strictly native, indigenous’. Thus, the term was
... originally used [by the British] to describe the native inhabitants of

North America, and later applied to the indigenous peoples of other regions
colonized by Europeans. Although the term is no longer commonly applied
to the indigenous ethnic groups of the United States or New Zealand, it
continues to be used in official and general contexts in Canada [… and
Australia to disrespectfully describe as it denies self-identification] the
native peoples of that country. (OED Online 2021b)
The use of ‘Aboriginal’ was proliferated extensively and generically

across the Australian continent by British colonialists in the early nine-
teenth century and the term has now become common parlance in
‘Australian’ use in deference to understanding that there are over 250
separate First Nation communities and Country’s in Australia. Each
community has their own Country-specific cultural protocols, language
or dialects, design iconography, land use planning and management
regimes, and so on. Thus, in this publication, I pay my respect to the
Wadawurrung whose Country I am writing/typing on and who employ
me to implement the aspirations of their culture and their Paleert Tjaara
Dja (Healthy Country Plan) (WTOAC 2020a; 2020b), and all Australian
First Nation Peoples and communities in the use of words and terms.
This is an important point for the reader to understand as it, in part,
involves a decolonisation of colonial labels, terms, and recognises sover-
eignty, and thus is a stepping-stone towards a successful engagement with
First Nation Peoples in Australia.
First Nation’s Australia is a vast landscape of lands and seas for which
over 250 Language Groups have resided on and looked after their respec-
tive Country from time immemorial. While archaeologists will talk about
‘Aboriginals arriving’ on this continent via the Nusantara land bridge
some 60,000–100,000 years ago, representing the oldest continuous
civilisation on planet earth, in First Nation’s eyes, they are the custodians
of their Country since time immemorial caring for Country in anticipa-
tion of the return of their Ancestors. In this context, history is never-
ending and past/present/future, Country is four-dimensional and talks as
a Noun with a capital ‘C’, and one is a ‘custodian’ and not a ‘land owner’
in Western definitions. The Western words ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Songlines’
have the same colonialisation issues.
32 D. S. Jones
Non-First Nation anthropologist Rose (1996, 7) has written that

‘Country, to use the philosopher’s term, is a “nourishing terrain”’. She
drew inspiration for this term from French philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas’ writings in Totalité et Infini (Levinas 1961). Thus, ‘Country is a
place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is
lived in and lived with’.
Country in Aboriginal English is not only a common noun but also a proper
noun. People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a
person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about coun-
try, feel sorry for country, and long for country. People say that country knows,
hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is not a gener-
alised or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms
like ‘spending a day in the country’ or ‘going up the country’. Rather, country is
a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and
a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourish-
ment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease.
This evocative quotation is perhaps the most often tract cited in

Australian academia, in explaining the term Country. More recently,
Budawang/Yuin woman Daniéle Hromek (2020, 1) has written:
‘Country’ (capital C) has a different meaning to the western understanding of

the word ‘country’ (small c).
The western experience of land is one of property, an appropriated ground
given a monetary value, a landscape that is tamed, built upon, produced,
owned. In the Aboriginal sense of the word, Country relates to the nation or
cultural group and land that they/we belong to, yearn for, find healing from
and will return to. However, Country means much more than land, it is their/
our place of origin in cultural, spiritual and literal terms. It includes not only
land but also skies and waters.
Country soars high into the atmosphere, deep into the planet crust and far
into the oceans. Country incorporates both the tangible and the intangible, for
instance, all the knowledges and cultural practices associated with land. People
are part of Country, and their/our identity is derived in a large way in relation
to Country. Their/our belonging, nurturing and reciprocal relationships come
through our connection to Country. In this way Country is key to our health
and wellbeing.
On Wadawurrung Country, Elder Corrina Eccles (COGG 2021, 2–3)

has spoken,
Our creation story and songlines are all connected, Country is a living entity.
We can close our eyes and hear our language from our Country being spoken by
our birds and all things around us. We can open our eyes and see our stories and
connection, we can walk barefoot and feel our Mother Earth. We can tradition-
ally burn Country for it to heal and renourish. Our cultural structures cared for
our Country for thousands of years. We as Wadawurrung People will continue
to advocate, care and walk together for our future generations and all people
living and visiting our Country, ‘Wadawurrung Country’.
Thus Country is a place + identity + Indigenous knowledge + language

+ responsibility/obligation. Country is one’s physical, spiritual, and socio-
emotional wellbeing and thus self-meaning.
But terrestrial Country is also translucent, has texture and voice, and it
is part of an intricate mosaic of spaces laced by Songlines (Chatwin
1987). The latter enable communication, ritual, trade, self-maturation,
and tie together narratives about Country crafting and creation. Country
has horizontal layers or sub-Country’s, Biik-ut (Below Country), Biik-dui
(On Country), Baanj Biik (Water Country), Murnmut Biik (Wind
Country), Wurru wurru Biik (Sky Country), and Tharangalk Biik (Forest
Country above the clouds) (Nicholson and Jones 2020). Therefore, it is
not simply one Country expanse, but it also possesses vertical Country
layers that are told as biogeographical abstractions like ‘Stony Country’,
‘Forest Country’, ‘Grassland plains’, ‘River Forest Country’, ‘Sea
Country’, and so on (Australia 2017; FAT et al. 2004; Powell et al. 2019;
PV et al. 2015; WTOAC 2020).
While Country is conventionally understood through Western eyes as
being horizontal and possessing terrestrial attributes, Country is also
multi-horizontal. This is a much harder concept to understand. Table 2.4,
abridged from Nicholson and Jones (2020, 515), varied by the author,
explains the conceptual multi-horizontal layers often used across the
Kulin Nation (without respective Language included) in their simplis-
tic form.
34 D. S. Jones
Table 2.4 Conceptual country layers. Source: abridged from Nicholson and Jones
(2020, 515), varied by the author
Forest country above the clouds

Sky country
Wind country
Water country
On country
Sea country
Below country
Indigenous Knowledge is located in the being that is Country. But one

needs to understand that the concept of Country cannot be comprehen-
sively translated as an ‘environment’ in Western terminology. Thus, while
Country may be an area of land that is overseen and managed by a First
Nation group, like the Wadawurrung People, with Country-specific
Creation Beings having divested culture and language, the relationship
between Wadawurrung People and their Country extends beyond our
Western sense of time. In First Nations societies in Australia, time is sung.
Time is the singing. Time is the endless act of that singing. Time is the
act or mental ponderings of ‘song’, speaking, humming, journeying, and
not simply the act of singing as often assumed. Time is the stories embod-
ied in and specific to Country that embodies the spiritual source of
knowledge essential to Wadawurrung past present future generations.
Thus, the Mak Mak people from Country south-west of Darwin, in the
Northern Territory, observe that their Country affects their emotion
and memory:
What’s the first thing that enters your mind when you hear the name of your
country? ‘Matri lerri weti ngirrbuty tyen.’ [I am happy now], sometimes
referred to as having a ‘good binyji’ [feeling of being glad all over]. ‘I can look
every place. All the sites pass by me like a slide show. I see my (old people)
walking across the great plains, making camp, I can still remember their voices
as they would cry out, laugh and chatter with one another … I vividly remem-
ber my childhood. Once again I am there with them’ [sic]. (Deveraux 1997, 72)
Country is thus alive. ‘Country in Aboriginal English is not only a

common noun but also a proper noun. People talk about Country in the
same way that they would talk about a person’ (Rose 1996, 7). Thus, to
forget Country from built environment discipline design processes about

land and water is like forgetting about family.
Indigenous Australian ontologies involve ways of being and knowing
that emerge from the intertwining relationships between Country,
(Aboriginal), Law [lore], and Dreaming; the latter term in italics we rec-
ognise as a Westernised descriptor of this four-dimensional realm. In
contrast, Western epistemologies reflect a position in which people own,
divide, and control land. In this lens, Palawa woman and architect Sarah
Lynn Rees has written, ‘Aboriginal people don’t “own” land, they are
“owned by it”’ (Rees 2018, 181). Similarly, Burarrwanga et al. have
expressed in Hromek’s (2018, 222) research that ‘since country cannot be
divided, while the land may be damaged or traumatised by colonial pro-
cesses, like a broken arm, it can heal through Country, Thus if one part is
removed physically, the songs and stories keep it in place, in memory, and
its knowledges remain intact [sic]’.
Accordingly, while European settlement of the Australian continent
and its waters involves a history of dispossession, predicated upon the
overturned legal tenet of terra nullius, it has little altered Indigenous peo-
ples’ perceptions of spaces, and their overarching concept of their Country
remains unaffected.
As stated by Rose and Hromek, Country is alive and intelligent and
provides everything that Wadawurrung people need. So while Country
exists physically ‘outside’ as a living place that the Wadawurrung (and
animals and Creation Beings) inhabit, it is also a place or void through
which one learns culture and respects being human in a proper and
respectful way. As expressed by Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Di Kerr, ‘if you
care for Country it will in turn care for you’ (Kerr 2021). Thus, if one lets
Country become unhealthy, you and all its inhabitants become unhealthy.
Country provides everything the Wadawurrung need for their life,
informing and enabling the curation of their lands and waters feeding
humans and animals alike, offering language and nomenclature, and pro-
viding the ‘operational’ structure to their society today and into the future
in anticipation of the return of their Creation Beings. Wadawurrung man
Gareth Powell has explained that it is all a ‘design’, a ‘masterplan’ (Powell
and Jones 2018, 24).
36 D. S. Jones
Language is integral to Country. In First Nation society, language is

Country. It explains, narrates, speaks, sings, and gives meaning to the oral
words and interactions of humans, animals, avifauna, the stars, the veg-
etation, and the waters rights down to their riffles. Language is a cata-
logue of resources, gives meaning to self and purpose to all life, and is not
a simply oral/text communication media as used in Western society.
Thus, language is inside and of Country, and one needs to respect, listen
to, engage with this language narrating, and understand its nuances as
precursor to, during, and after one’s act of designing. As explained by
Wadawurrung Elder Uncle Bryon Powell (Powell et al. 2019, 64):
The Wadawurrung language is dynamic. In our eyes ‘Wadawurrung’ is English-

written as ‘Wadawurrung’ and not ‘Wada wurrung’ or ‘Wathaurong’. It is our
meaning, it is our library of law and ‘history’, it explains or identifies place(s)
or resources, or enables daily communication. It is, however, not a written static
language that can be bound into a single dictionary.
Wadawurrung language is intertwined with our Country, and culturally
cannot be separated. To speak or sing our language is to respect and nurture and
celebrate our Country.
A ‘healthy’ or ‘good’ Country is one where all the tangible and intan-
gible elements do their activities respectfully and in harmony. Harmony
equals the ‘nourishment’. Rose (1996, 10) observes that
… because there is no site, no position, from which the interest of one can be
disengaged from the interests of others in the long term. Self-interest and the
interest of all of the other living components of country (the self-interest of kan-
garoos, barramundi, eels and so on), cannot exist independently of each other
in the long term. The interdependence of all life within country constitutes a
hard but essential lesson.
Change one variable in the interdependence, like removing a natural

predator or constructing a roadway or planting an incorrect plant species,
then one changes the interdependence and ‘nourishment’ process and its
continuum.
‘Destroy’ one component, or layer of Country, and you ultimately
destroy yourself and Country as they all rely on each other for survival.
Not understanding any of this, you will fail in engaging with First
Nation’s communities in Australia in a design or planning project. Also
communicating and collaborating with more than just an Elder can steer
away from tokenistic gestures of consultation as they hold specific sets of
knowledge, while others in their community hold others that can assist in
creating a complete picture of their narrative and culture.
Therefore, while Country may be an area of land that is overseen and
managed by an Aboriginal group, like the Wadawurrung people, with
the Creation Beings transferring Wadawurrung culture and language to
their People; the relationship between Wadawurrung people and their
Country extends beyond the Western sense of time. Such time is sung,
it is in the stories embodied in and specific to Country, and is the spiri-
tual source of knowledge essential to Wadawurrung past, present and
future. Thus, Country is alive and intelligent and provides everything
that its people need. Country exists physically outside as a living place
that the Wadawurrung and animals and Creation Beings inhabit and is a
place through which one learns culture and gives it due regard as a tem-
plate for being human in a proper and respectful way. Country provides
everything the Wadawurrung need to equip their life, curate their land
and water, feed human and animal, offer language and nomenclature as
a library, and provide the operational structure to their society. For today
and into the future, it is in anticipation of the return of their Creation
Beings. It is all a design, a master plan.
In Western eyes, the landscape canvas is a product of design, hosts it,
and also informs it. In Wadawurrung eyes, landscape canvas is a design
historically established by Wadawurrung Creation Beings that both ani-
mals and humans engage with in partnership today, of which our Creation
Beings established the original landscape patterns, and the rules and pro-
tocols about Wadawurrung Country occupancy and use. In this sense,
‘design’ is not simply about the deliverables of conventional Western
briefs, but equally about individual people and animals who design by
their actions. It is also about the locus of that design. Wadawurrung cul-
ture exists in patterns and living conversations of relationships with our
Country. Any designed landscape, master plan, playground, nomencla-
ture use, and so on needs to be informed by respectful discussions with
38 D. S. Jones
one or more knowledge holders or Elders; not necessarily through a con-

ventional in-room, marquee-in-the-field, wander-with-an Elder, or an
Elder-authored-email community engagement process.
2.5 Roadmaps to Reading, Experiencing,

and Understanding
The spirit of a place constructs tangible characteristics, at the same time
as the physical place affects and structures the spirit. Places are influenced
by different social actors, in terms of realisers and users who actively par-
ticipate in the construction of their meanings. Considered in its rela-
tional dynamics, the spirit of the place assumes a multidimensional and
polyvalent character, possessing numerous and different meanings. It is a
dynamic approach that allows us to grasp the possible diversity and vari-
ety characterising the spirit of a place. The notion of genius loci helps us
to better understand the living and permanent character of monuments,
sites, cultural landscapes, and places in general. It provides a richer and
more dynamic vision of the concept of place, in both its tangible and
intangible dimensions. The spirit of places does not exist in itself: rather,
it is a human construction that satisfies social, cultural, and religious
needs. As Norberg-Schulz (1980, 182) has written:
The structure of a place is not a fixed, eternal condition: as a rule, places change,
and sometimes even rapidly. This does not mean, however, that the genius loci
must necessarily change or be lost. … The stabilitatis loci is a necessary condi-
tion for human life. … Protecting and conserving the genius loci means concre-
tising its essence in ever-new historical contexts. Respecting the genius loci does
not mean copying ancient models, but highlighting the identity of the place and
interpreting it in a new way. Only in this way can we speak of a living tradi-
tion that justifies the changes referring to a series of local parameters.
To keep and valorise the spirit of place we need to accomplish three

main steps: rethink, protect, and transmit the place and its spirit. This
threefold movement is not linear. To be successful, it needs to be circular
and incremental.
To take care of a place and its genius loci, it is necessary to know how
to see and recognise them; furthermore, we need to know how to inter-
pret their value. The care and reconstruction of places in sustainable
forms therefore require active, conscious citizenship, capable of combin-
ing contextual knowledge with expert knowledge through forms of par-
ticipatory democracy.
Seddon (1979), in ‘The Genius Loci and Australian Landscape’, pro-
posed a landscape interpretation and management approach to under-
standing Australian landscapes whereby
those who are responsible for the care of landscape in this country can do much
to resist the effects of homogenising technology, to individuate by understanding
and clarifying the locally distinctive—in short, by respecting the genius loci.
What follows are some suggestions as to how this might be done, and some pos-
sible reason for doing so. The suggestions are all commonplace, but they are
nevertheless regularly disregarded:
His guideline criteria for interpreting include the following: (1) under-
stand the geology and display it where you can; (2) study the landform,
and build in sympathy with it, if possible; (3) study the soil; (4) interfere
as little as possible with the natural hydrology; (5) study the natural veg-
etation, and the existing vegetation; (6) respect the cultural landscape;
and (7) analyse the genius loci of our landscapes, and celebrate them.
In today’s Western knowledge systems, genius loci still remains an
assumed knowledge realm, a theory in its own right, and one lacking the
veracity to inform and guide design and or assess landscapes as to their
true measure of sense. As observed by Thompson (2003, 68), ‘the fact
that an idea has a long pedigree does not make it true or useful … The
question is really whether the genius loci is just a poetic piece of animism
or whether it can be given some more definite and useful sense’. As pos-
sible answers, Jones (1993, 2002) offers a possible framework, and Brook
(2000) guides, with both concluding that genius loci is not a single idea
but a tapestry of ideas and threads. In the shadow of extensive defini-
tional interpretations of the idea, the former has positioned the frame-
work in a dynamic cross-temporal model, whereas the latter has not
addressed time. Brook (2000) offers genius loci interpretative answers in
40 D. S. Jones
the human tapestry and relational threads wherein certain places are the
abodes of special beings, as well energy fields, authenticity, coherent nar-
rative, local distinctiveness, essence, character, ecosystem, pantheism,
panpsychism, health, and special atmosphere. Jones (1993) offers genius
loci interpretative answer threads in the holistic human and non-human
realms and relational threads of domains, pathways, gathering places,
shelters, plants, animals, Dreamings, and nature’s rhythms. Both recog-
nise that genius loci is a tapestry possessing a weft of threads.
The following chapters methodologically follow this eight-themed
framework, summarised in Table 2.5, of which the detail is set out in
Table 2.6.
The application of the eight-themed framework is, in this research,
applied and tested upon one landscape. But, it is tested and evaluated
against three slightly over-lapping time phases—1800–1840, 1830–1870,
1860–1900—as these possess distinct human occupancy and governance
regimes and cultures. Figure 2.1 diagrammatically expresses this temporal
x thematic inquiry. This methodological strategy offers a unique insight
normally not afforded by generic loci inquiries that consider a point in
time as their reference frame, thereby lacking the capacity to harness and
consider the dynamic and temporality quality of landscape as being an
agent in assembling relationships. Interestingly, the first time phase
affords a capacity to consider the landscape’s place values against an
Table 2.5 Cross-comparison of the Jones (1993) and Brook (2000) frameworks.
Source: Adapted by the author
Jones (1993) Brook (2000)
Domains [Country] Abodes of special beings
Pathways Energy fields and abodes of special beings
Gathering Places
Shelters Health
Plants Ecosystem
Animals
Dreamings/imagery Coherent narrative
Pantheism
Panpsychism
Special atmosphere
Rhythms Local distinctiveness
Essence
Table 2.6 The detail of the Jones (1993) thematic framework. Source: author
Domains • The spatial estates and edges of a place or landscape, and
[Country]: names of points and expanses we designate to identify them.
Each landscape has some form of spatial delineation, a set of
distinct characteristics that distinguish it from other landscapes,
and instil confidence in knowing where I am
Pathways: • The mental and earthly pathways, routes, journeys across and
through a landscape. Journey is an implicit metaphor in
landscape occupancy, whether real or mental or metaphysical,
in Australia
Gathering • The points, nodes, and landmarks that are focus for activities.
Places: Our camping places, places of daily life-sustaining activities and
death, and places of residency that instil kinship and sensibilities
with a community
Shelters: • The places of habitation or shelter created by humans within
the landscape. Edifices in shapes and forms constructed from
organic materials in the landscape that resonate with senses of
domain and meaning
Plants: • The vegetative fabric that carpets the landscape. The differing
foliage with its colours, grains, textures, structures, and foods,
which establish part of the sensory feeling and taste of the
tapestry
Animals: • The residents of the animal world which equally participate in
the tapestry—whether faunal, avifaunal, insect or aquatic—
shaping part of its experiential weft, and the means by which
humans harvested them
Imagery: • The mental answers and dreams that are expressed in myths,
artefacts and artistic creations to celebrate human presence and
to explain the latent forces experienced in and interpreted from
the landscape. It involves the media used to articulate landscape
spirit
Rhythms: • Clouds, droughts, floods, fires, skies, and so on—around which
the above themes modulate their patterns, irrespective of
human or animal attempts at domination or control, and the
uniquely human sensory responses to these events and
occurrences
Aboriginal lens, drawing upon and tempered by colonial eyes and writ-
ings. The latter resources today provide important evidence of occupancy,
knowledge, language, and story for many of the contemporary Aboriginal
communities who are seeking language revival, reconciliation and treaty
aspirations, and in guiding the formulation of their Country Plans as
Western instruments of their vision for the future custodianship and
management of their respective Country.
42 D. S. Jones
Country Colonial Sunlit

Dreaming Noontide Afternoon
1800-1840 1830-1870 1860-1900
Theme: Domains
Theme: Pathways
Theme: Gathering Places
Theme: Shelters
Theme: Plants
Theme: Animals
Theme: Imagery
Theme: Rhythms
Fig. 2.1 The temporal x thematic inquiry employed in this research. Source: author
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3
Sense of Place: The Western District
of Australia
The diary entry reads:
9th February 1965.

Westward, the bitumen weaves over hillocks cloaked in regenerating stringy-
bark, and gorse choked streams; trees thin out as the wide expanse is approached.
A relentless horizon of two parallel plains—azure blue over and dusky yellow
below—stretches out in the early morning glow. The flow of the plains picks up
the bitumen and entrances it in a slow rhythm of bends and curves. Quickly lost
are the narrow and close façades of gold mining townships; their rickety dust-
clothed weatherboard boxes peter out along granular quartz avenues pocked
with cypress, poplars and fruit trees. The close, the undulating, the green, and
the semblance of habitation give way to the horizon, and rolling seas of red-
dened grasses and puffy opaque clouds.
Slowly the car turns into a laneway off the main highway and moves into the
depths of the great grass ocean. It is early Tuesday morning in February, yet the
summer sun bleeds down its wrath, and mists dance as mirages on the brackish
Lake McLaren. I drive slowly along Nerrin Nerrin Road considering the day’s
appointments and the ruddy sunburnt face of Jack Moran. Past neat lines of
ageing Sugar Gums, past the inveterate general store on the far flank of the wide
road reserve, and over the railway line until the conical form of Mt Hamilton
slowly comes into view. Its magical and pristine form is contrary to the
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_3
50 D. S. Jones
onotonous flat plain. White cockatoos quietly browse on grass seeds in the
m
adjacent paddock. Slower, and slower the car moves.
A solitary figure is struggling with the wire at a paddock corner; a wide
brimmed hat shadowing the face, blue heeler at station. Jack is checking his
lines and carrying out regular repairs. He is a veteran of his land with a lineage
tracing back to expansive runs in the ‘wilderness’ and green folds in the
Scottish Borders.
3.1 Living in Australia Felix

The land is, in short, open and available in its present state, for all the purposes
of civilized man. We traversed it in two directions with heavy carts, meeting no
other obstruction than the softness of the rich soil; and, in returning, over flow-
ery plains and green hills, fanned by the breezes of early spring, I named this
region Australia Felix, the better to distinguish it from the parched deserts of the
interior country, where we had wandered so unprofitably, and so long.
What voices and environmental traits control our connections and arouse
our faculties to distinct atmospheres or sensations in a landscape? There
is an acknowledged envelope of spirit in the Western District. One senses
power; but it is not just the expansiveness, the intensity of light, or the
unchanging vegetation and cloud patterns. It is a combination of factors
that subtly emanate psychological control over the resident and visitor.
The District engages an individual in a particular ‘church’,
… a society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same
way [and] … that they translate these common ideas into common practices.
It is the materials of this landscape tracery that are the focus of my

inquiries in seeking to determine the connections and their collective
strength. Those walls, stained glass windows, plaques, numberless names
and childhood incisions, and the grains and footprints in the floorboards
and aisle rows of that structure—their embellishments, frequency of
applications, textures, colours, smells, purposes, abandoned and porten-
tous mysteries—that collectively characterise and produce a distinct
experience. The experience, and its inert strength, perpetuates the
3 Sense of Place: The Western District of Australia 51
scratches, stains, and dust particles that are integral to human lineage or
time. These produce a particular sense of place.
* * *
The pastoral notion lies in the lush green pastures of England and
Scotland. It is a notion where man and nature collectively create a land-
scape that entwines beauty, variety, and harmony with utilitarian agricul-
tural (and scientific) activities together in a Claude-like representation.
Parklands encompassing stately homes that exploited the artistic, the
vista, the mysterious and eighteenth-century landscape school ideals,
were a product of this notion. Within the parklands was a humanised
identity seeking to evoke a sense of picturesque beauty with ancient
foundations:
PICTURESQUENESS … a station between beauty and sublimity; and on

that account, perhaps, is more frequently and more happily blended with them
both than they are with each other. It is, however, perfectly distinct from either;
and first, with respect to beauty, it is evident, from all that has been said, that
they are founded on very opposite qualities; the one on smoothness, the other on
roughness;—the one on gradual, the other on sudden variation;—the one on
ideas of youth and freshness, the other on that of age, and even of decay.
Figures 3.1 and 3.2 depict the conceptual vegetation units and extent
of this volcanic plain.
The notion fits uncomfortably with the Western District although
some illusory sketches lie in the paddocks of ‘Mount Noorat’ and
‘Murndal’. A tension is present between any pastoral ethic, any pictur-
esque notion, and a landscape. The pastoral notion is a product of
European cultural sensibilities transplanted and a utilitarian objective to
‘clean’ the landscape of its litter and untidiness. Deliberate orchestration
of this landscape came from functional need and from nostalgic cultural
baggage of enclosure changes in the British countryside.
Colonials did not determine to create a new, improved landscape con-
forming to their ideals in the District. Rather they fashioned it within
their functional conceptions of agriculture without regard to Aboriginal
52
D. S. Jones
Fig. 3.1 Existing vegetation units

Fig. 3.2 Extent of volcanic plains and treeless areas

54 D. S. Jones
accretions of occupancy and natural gardening practices. The pastoral

ethic was simply an intellectual vehicle they could relate to, which was
proffered in word and story during initial occupancy, until an alternative
relationship modified the approach. The romanticism of the notion,
however, continues in family lineage, bush ethos, and imagery peculiar to
the District that reinforces myths about golden fleece, landed aristocracy,
architectural follies, and economic and cultural power bases that affected
the rest of the continent.
This romanticism inspired pages and canvases of dreams and visions.
It, however, failed to accord any determinism to the landscape itself, and
the environment it was located within. It also failed to accord any credi-
bility to the Dreaming foundations of the landscape—a terra nullius of
successive human generations and mythological ancestors wiped from
pastures of Kangaroo Grass (Themeda triandra) and assemblages of cul-
turally significant spaces and monuments.
Irrespective of ideology, relationship, and endeavour, particular land-
scape themes have remained. The focus of power and mystique is still
contained in the aureate space that controls our mental stimuli and the
natural forces—the landscape.
* * *
Landscape is a world of symbols and meaningful points and objects of

geographical and human construction with mythological significance.
Places of mythical being passage and activity form the mental anchorages
in signs and stories that weave an ‘oral literature’, or history and meaning-
ful purpose, into the rocks, trees, clouds, animals, birds, and foodstuffs of
the landscape and waark [open plains].
Aboriginal reality lives in two coextensive domains translated into the
European term Dreaming. One domain is occupied by humans, who are
guided by their sensory mental baggage. The other is occupied by spirits,
beings, and demons deeply woven into myths, stories, and place names.
Entry into the latter domain is obtained through the metaphysical act of
dreaming, or into the former domain of humans by the act of reliving the
past ancestors and their travels in song and dance. The two domains are
inseparable realms of Aboriginal reality.
Aboriginal theory of the creation is dependent upon the Dreaming. It

was born in a time when the landscape was without geographical and
natural points, uninhabited by life forms, and nameless of identifiable
points in space. Into this void entered Bunjil/Bundjil, a ‘good spirit’, or
god-like entity, who shaped a series of ancestral beings. These beings set
forth across the void incising the earth and shaping the places, creeks,
valleys, mountains, ranges and sink-holes, as acts of creation. These acts
are ‘celebrated’ or rekindled in the myths and songlines of the Dreaming,
when features of the earth were formed, animals and birds made, and
their distinctive features and habits allocated.
Place and feature in landscape, accordingly, hold mental anchorages to
the campsites, incidents, and travel of ancestral beings. As ‘sacred sites’,
they radiate power like gravity. They can also be viewed as the core enti-
ties within hills, riverbeds, or sink-holes, as examples. Constellations of
sites are conceived as the tracks of ancestral beings, as often songlines.
People were also formed in this succession of creation acts. They were
entrusted with languages, ‘estates’ within the landscape, a selection of
songs, dances, icons, and important sites together with a moral obliga-
tion to care for these spaces and knowledge in anticipation of the return
of the ancestors. Kinship relationships bound each person to the land-
scape through a series of rules, mytho-totemic relationships, and moi-
eties. Transgression from these rules and ‘estates’, established at the time
of creation, brought forth latent powers of cataclysmic consequences—
the wrath of ancestral beings.
Here was a phenomenal world where reality was both the dream and
the world, never illusion. Gregory Bateson noted:
The individual mind is imminent but not only in the body. It is imminent also
in pathways and messages outside the body, and there is a larger mind of which
the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger mind is comparable to
God and is perhaps what some people mean by God, but it is still imminent in
the total interconnected social systems and planetary ecology.
* * *
56 D. S. Jones
Landscape contains differing values and ‘narratives’ blinkered by our per-

ceptions. We bear particular ideological relationships with the space with
mental constructions in response to the landscape. It is our allegiance to
landscape, born in our blood, that envelopes our senses, decisions, and
responses. Landscape is a volume, full of voices, into which we participate
and learn. Landscape binds us together into a series of threads within a
lacework that has succumbed to varying levels of deterioration over suc-
cessive generations but is still held together, tightly, indelibly. As David
Lowenthal explains, ‘It is the landscape as a whole—that largely man-
made tapestry, in which all our others activities are embedded … which
gives them their sense of place’.
3.2 Rhythms: The Land Beyond the Sky

The southern constellations were circling before me above the leafy tops of the
forest. Hour after hour I watched their noiseless progress. The Southern Cross
was at the first erect, …
I could not help noticing … that the foot of the Cross rests upon that mysterious
region of void and darkness, which looms forth as a black spectre amidst the
glowing beauties of the brilliant galaxy … Fancy pictured a stray spirit, lost in
that starry Light-house upon the borders of the dark ocean.
* * *
The concept of spirit, a notion of idealistic order, is inherently woven into

Australian landscape mythology. Truth and normalcy are disrupted by
inexplicable phenomena and preternatural experiences, encouraging the
mental construction of an earth spirit. This reality is integral to the
Aboriginal societal and ecological view. It explains the manifest behind
natural phenomena, the presence of landscape features, the roles of plant,
animal and human lives, cycles of fertility, and seasonal patterns.
In keeping with this reality, Aboriginals devised or were invested with
a set of stories and myths that explained these phenomena and enhanced
the position of earth spirits. In Europe, William Wordsworth in The

Prelude II recognised that a similar type of reality inhabited the English
countryside:
I would stand …
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth.
Such a ‘ghostly language’ comes forth in colonial reactions to the

Australian landscape: ‘What spirits wake when the earth is still?’ Stories
of foreboding, ‘wilderness’, ‘weird melancholy’, and bush mythology call
forth unique human responses to explain the intangible power and force
of the land itself. Symbols of clouds, Bunyips, brightness of light, myste-
rious events and circumstances subtly pervade both period and contem-
porary literature, poetry, myth, legend, and painting inferring something
inexplicable or powerful.
The powerful themes of an earth spirit are exemplified in the romanti-
cised drama of McCubbin’s Lost [in the Bush] (1886) painting, or in the
‘loneliness in desolation’ echoed in The Mountains Have a Secret. Thus,
‘Those bland landscapes perfectly matched to the forlorn cries of crows’,
echoing the ever-present bird life, strange apparitions of melting, red-
roofed buildings in ‘low green hills … [as if ] a temple of the Sun-God or
a palace of pleasure’, or illusions of ‘gnarl’d, knotted trunks Eucalyptian …
like weird columns Egyptian’. Those ‘ancient’ ‘erysipelas convalescents’,
River Red Gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), which today stand as explan-
atory literary symbols of a ‘timeless land’ ‘immersed still in the Dream
Time of the country’s first people’ or are viewed as accomplices to the
‘terror of the bush’.
Many of these Aboriginal and European traditions are resident in the
‘languages’ of the District’s landscape and environment. They compel,
provide answers, belie factual realities, impart strength, and contradict
European lore. Perhaps it is
the soft, blue, humanless sky … [that provokes] the pale, white unwritten
atmosphere of Australia, [where:]
58 D. S. Jones
All creation is new and strange. The trees … The graceful shrubs, the bright-
coloured flowers, ay, the very grass itself, are of species unknown in Europe;
while flaming lories and brilliant parroquets fly whistling, not musically,
through the gloomy forest, and overhead … countless cockatoos wheel and
scream in noisy joy …
Entry into this landscape confronted the European psyche. Things

were strange, convoluted, and contradictory to their cultural baggage.
Answers were never readily forthcoming, and an ability to read and
understand the landscape and its environment was slow to evolve. In
contrast, Aboriginals, as earlier immigrants, had over 60,000 years to
explore, muse, and construct answers to these problems amidst dramatic
changes in the landscape biogeography.
As humans, we will always construct answers as responses within the
frames of our ideologies to explain and respond to phenomena and par-
ticular scenes or images. We are also in an environmental system that has
chains and cycles over which we have little control or say. Both also need
to be sketched here as they are the outside shell to the themes that are
explored in the following sections.
* * *
To Aboriginal tribes of Kulin Victoria, Bunjil [eaglehawk] was the creator

of all things. He also had assistance from his son Bin-beal [rainbow] and
his brother Pal-ly-yan. He warmed the sun, thence warming beek [earth].
In his travels across beek, he applied his knife, bul-li-to kul-pen-kul-pen
gue-up, by cutting the landscape in many places to form creeks, rivers,
mountains, plains, and valleys. Aboriginals around the Corangamite area
called Bunjil, ‘Pirnmeheeal’. To them, he was a gigantic man living in the
clouds. His voice, thunder, expressed his pleasure by bringing rains to
foster fertility, grass, and roots. Kulin myth records that Bunjil breathed
life into two males (Ber-rook-born and Koo-kin Ber-rook) after sculpturing
them from koolin [clay] with his knife on sheets of bark. From Messmate
stringybark, he created their straight and curly hair, respectively.
Bunjil’s daughter and sons created great wee-oong-koork on waark
[open plains], shaking the great trees, and cutting the men, women, and
children into little pieces. Each piece however retained life-like tur-ror
[worms] so bullito, bullito, koor-reen, pit-ker-reen [great, great storms and
whirlwinds] lifted the pieces into the sky like flakes of kabbing [snow].
Carried in the clouds, Bunjil dispersed the pieces, scattering men and
women over the earth, as he pleased. The good men and women were also
reconstructed as stars. This explanation of human creation and distribu-
tion is guided by the belief in Bunjil; his retributions from the sky are
expressions of displeasure with his children on beek. In his position as the
star Fomalhaut, he watches over Aboriginals and distributes punishment
or rich game.
This conception of evolution was ever present in Aboriginal culture in
south-eastern Australia. It was, however, not incorporated by the subse-
quent European culture that occupied the same landscape. The following
two stories are poignant examples of confrontations of myths with reality
during the mid- to late 1800s and highlight different perceptions and
ideologies by alternate cultures to the issues of phenomena and spirits.
On the banks of Wuurong yæring, a waterhole in Spring Creek, a ‘band’
of Aboriginals were startled while fishing by what they perceived as
Muuruup. This fearsome bad spirit, ‘maker of bad-smelling smoke’, nor-
mally visited beek in the form of lightning. The Gulag gundidj of the Girai
wurrung, at ‘Merrang’, described their sighting of Muuruup as ‘a huge
black man, carrying a great many spears, with a long train of snakes
streaming behind him, “like smoke from a steamboat”’. At the waterhole,
Muuruup bellowed loudly during the afternoon and evening terrifying
Aboriginals, shaking ‘two tomahawks in his head’. On his departure in
the morning, his distinctive footprints were tracked to an open wood-
land, where he was confronted by warriors who sought the tomahawks.
The astonished Muuruup scoured beek, ‘bellowed, shook his head (with a
sheet of tin tied across his face), and charged’.
The first story tells of the confrontation of Aboriginal mythology to
the bullock, an animal not present in their traditions. The second, as fol-
lows, tells of the confusion wrought by Aboriginal presence that inspired
prehistoric notions of Stonehenge.
In the 1870s, a story was reported in Chambers’ Miscellany of antiquar-
ian stone-circles on waark from a squatter’s letter sent to Scotland. It was
reported that the circles, 3–330 m in diameter with stones of varied
60 D. S. Jones
shapes and sizes, often with an inner-circle, had no oral Aboriginal ‘tradi-
tion’ attached thereto; thus attracting prominence as the Australian ver-
sion of Avebury. Period lithographs in Australia, New Zealand, and
Scotland portrayed awesome pillars of stone on waark, and commentar-
ies postulated as to their antiquarian and religious purposes. Local inves-
tigation subsequently disproved these stories. The heaped arrangements
of stones, instead, were constructed for wind shelter by Aboriginals
because timber was sparse on waark. Another squatter later noted that
‘the natives there formed these break-winds of stones, placed on edge in
a circular form, some of them very perfect, leaving the opening generally
toward the east, the prevailing winds coming from the north-west and
south-west’. While waark Aboriginals certainly manipulated random
stone arrangements for ceremonial and ecological purposes, no mega-
lithic circles are now attributed to them.
In both instances, the landscape provoked responses that were peculiar
to the observer’s cultural traditions and beliefs. Both sought answers to
what they saw and experienced by drawing upon their myths and belief
systems to attach credible answers to phenomena. These responses were
later shattered as cross-cultural information engendered an alternate
comprehension of the incidents.
* * *
By recognising and celebrating aspects around us, we consummate our

relationship with a landscape. Our relationship to a landscape is articu-
lated in recognising its presence. We cast stories about its places, intro-
duce ‘specificity and difference’ to nurture their importance, and celebrate
them in traces and cairns. We also perceive a form of ‘ownership’, belong-
ingness, or stewardship to the landscape, dividing and ‘owning’ it and its
contents through cultural rules and principles. It is valuable to under-
stand the collective and antithesis relationships to this landscape, and
secondly, the essential differences in Aboriginal and colonial notions
of ‘land’.
Probably the most enduring Aboriginal myth is that of the Bunyip.
The presence of a gigantic carnivorous animal inhabiting deep waterholes
in creeks became a tenet of the landscape, preventing bathing in many
holes and producing fear from its ‘terrifying bellowings’. While the
Bunyip today may be identified as the Australian Fur-Seal (Arctocephalus
pusillus), the stories transcended fact and readily entered into colonial
literature about waterholes. Many a child was told to stay away from a
waterhole because of the Bunyip’s presence—an oral tradition that has
been copied into contemporary children’s literature. The abodes of
Aboriginal spirits, however, were not accepted with such credence.
While the Bunyip is linked to place in Aboriginal mythology, the con-
cept of a ‘picturesque’ landscape transposed by English, Irish, and Scottish
thought remains the antithesis of the plains morphology; and yet, it was
attempted. Landscape was deliberately created, planted, structured,
drained, and dammed by squatters. The nature of this newly contrived
cosmos became an expression of colonial domination and alienation.
Actions drew their inspirations from vales in the Borders, the ‘parkes’ and
commons of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, and the tra-
ditions of the British enclosure movement. The accessible literature of
William Kent, Uvedale Price, and John Claudius Loudon perhaps assisted
these attempts. The irony was that one culturally created landscape was
being mentally and physically manipulated to construct an alternate cul-
tural landscape.
What was being manipulated, celebrated, and enshrined was land and
its contents. A material commodity to exploit for some, a corporeal realm
to steward for others. This striking contradiction in perceptions and uses
to ‘land’ underlies the clash between Aboriginals and colonials in the
District. Alternate cultural beliefs and traditions determined landscape
relationships and treatments, but the greater environment orchestrated
the natural and cultural patterns and events. In contrast, Mitchell was the
‘harbinger of mighty changes’ to this ‘sublime solitude’ of terra nullius.
Land was treated as an open resource that an individual could ringbark,
plough a line, or peg out a distinct segment of open space, vegetation, or
water resource. But the squatter also became a communal recipient of
rain, shine, fire, flood, and plague. Distinctively the ‘run’ formed an indi-
vidual’s ‘range’—an exploitable item, and a forage ground to be exchanged
for monetary or resource gain. Territory was distinct, articulated on paper
and on the surface as traces, and subject to mutual resource sharing only
by negotiated agreement. New mytho-totemic relationships to land were
62 D. S. Jones
devised to celebrate the sheep. Western religions followed the squatters,

establishing centres of ecumenical symbolism according to user catch-
ments than by landscape feature of pre-history.
* * *
Seasons envelop this landscape in regular cycles bringing with them blos-
soms, rains, dryness, birth, and migration. Their presence signals rituals
in human, animal, and floral life patterns. To appreciate their impact
upon a landscape is to comprehend the changes in patterns, colours,
scents, atmospheric affects, and distinct modes of behaviour in people,
animals, and flora. Summer, autumn, winter, and spring are Western
abstractions of these cycles. Aboriginal time and activities were controlled
by the signals that each environmental change announced (i.e. flower-
ings, migrations of animals, and climatic occurrences), and time was not
dissected into distinct calendar compartments or periods with similar
nomenclature. European seasonal terms used herein are to aid temporal
identification only.
‘A hot dull haze was over the forest and mountain … In short, summer
had come with a vengeance; every one felt hot, idle, and thirsty, and
“there was nothing doing”’. Summer, or late dry season, weather was
‘usually hot and dry’, but to some the ‘summer morn was refreshingly
cool, the first hour’s ride was delicious’. Bursaria called forth creamy fra-
grant flowers. On the Silver Banksia, Golden and Late Black Wattles yel-
low flowers bloomed in the sun, and ruddy billows of Kangaroo Grass
inflorescences taunted the heat. Manna Gums, so favoured by Koalas,
flowered and exuded its sweet liquids, prized by Aboriginals, down whitey
smooth ribbons and on weeping leaves. Characteristic traits were the dry-
ness, heat, south-west to south-east zephyrs, and the risk of fire:
Where, with fire and fierce drought on her tresses,

Insatiable Summer oppresses
Sere woodlands and sad wildernesses,
And faint flocks and herds.
In autumn, or the mid-dry season, a sere yellow colour mocked the

landscape, yet Manna Gums continued to flower. Watchful waark war-
riors, River Red Gums opened their buds, and slender wiry Common
Heaths display their white, pink, or red stalks in scrubby woodland car-
pets to south-westerly and south-easterly breezes. It was a time for lamb-
ing, when fish and eels began their migratory journeys, and when ‘the
great grass crop of Kangaroo, Wallaby and Spear, summer ripened, was
occasionally ignited in a dry autumn, and, like a prairie fire, swept all
before it’. Poet Gordon bestowed senescent tones to A Song of Autumn:
Where shall we go for our garlands glad

At the falling of the year,
When the burnt-up banks are yellow and sad,
When the boughs are yellow and sere?.
In its wake:
Wild Winter’s large flood-gates are loosened

And floods, freed by storm,
From broken up fountain heads, dash on
Dry deserts with long pent up passion.
If droughts continued, winter-time, or the good wet season, was

viewed as a saviour by Aboriginals notwithstanding its wrath that was
disliked by Europeans. Aboriginals moved to higher ground and cele-
brated fishing seasons at Tæ rak [Lake Condah]. As River Red Gums
continued to flower, Cherry Ballarts decorated their foliage with orange-
red fruits, variable Common Correas celebrated in the woodlands with
yellow-green or red and green flowers, and oats were harvested. The
change of winds to the west, buoyant streams and waterholes, signalled
the first draughts of spring.
Spring-time, or the early dry season, presented a magical landscape of
blooms, scents, colours, and foods.
OH, gaily sings the bird, and the wattle-boughs are stirr’d
And rustled by the scented breath of spring;
Oh, the dreary, wistful longing!
64 D. S. Jones
The ‘brown heath would have been a brilliant mass of flowers’.

Common Correas, ‘gay’ ‘pink and white blossoms’ of Common Heaths,
ripened orange-red fruits of Cherry Ballarts, and pale yellow flowers of
Blackwoods greeted the inhabitant. On the plains, swaths of dandelion-
like yellow flowers signalled harvests of rich tuberous foods; Murnongs,
purple-blue Grass lilies, purple Chocolate Lilies, and Greenhood Orchids
long dormant sprouted. It was a time for bird breeding, and egg collect-
ing by Aboriginals. But above all, the scent and majesty of Golden Wattles
was most potent:
In the Spring, when the wattle gold trembles

‘Twixt shadow and shine,
When each dew-laden air draught resembles
A long draught of wine.
* * *
While the rhetoric of a powerful phenomenon in the landscape, expressed

in colonial clichés of ‘timelessness’ and ‘dull monotonousness’, was com-
monplace, several atmospheric and land-based patterns were also impor-
tant. Forms of clouds, brilliance of light, colour of the ‘azure’ sky, wraiths
of drought, fire and wind, and the ‘scented’ smells that dwell in its breezes,
were familiar literary expressions that stimulated esoteric powers of inspi-
ration and imagination. Each were constant in an evolving landscape, but
they also figure prominently in the characterisations of the District.
There is something striking in the pellucid beauty of bright sum-
mer skies:
When the sky-line’s blue burnish’d resistance

Makes deeper the dreamiest distance.
The literal energy in the sky prompted a narrowing of the iris because
of its brilliance and harshness. ‘How blue the sky!’ was the exclamation,
in all its variations. If the sky was ‘azure blue’, then clouds became impor-
tant actors. They held patterns, caricatures, and signs of impending events
and endowed the ‘flowery plains’ with seeds of renourishment.
Clouds could be ‘dense black … like a pall’, ‘piled up range beyond

range with the scarlet and purple splendour of cloudland’; like a ‘red-
litten cloud prison, wherein the sun lay dying!’ They held warnings of the
new day, joys of rain, fears of lightning, and often masked ‘Behind a
curtain of sable cloud, / With a fringe of scarlet and gold … the red sun’.
That ‘red sun’, with its ‘gorgeous rays leaving mellowed tints of varied
hue’, dominated the landscape. It coloured skies and clouds with brilliant
light and influenced life.
The colonial inhabited ‘wastes of sun-scorched sand’, with ‘sickly,
smoky shadows through the sleepy sunlight swim[ming]’. All waited
until the ‘golden light came stealing’, ‘going down in purple and scarlet
splendor’. Under ‘a sudden and lurid frown’ colonials mustered cattle,
flocks, or roots while the ‘skies were red’, and felt broiled in its lack of
consolation or shadow.
The sun’s brilliance of light was the creator of dreamy horizon dis-
tances. The luminescence of the air presented ‘haunting mirage[s]’ mock-
ing sights. The ‘plains glowed red in tremulous light’, ‘but the “light
which never was on sea or shore” was there’ in the atmosphere.
A ‘lurid frown’ often heralded a crystal-clear night sky. There was a
sense of warmth in its presence yet ‘appalling’ silence in the stillness it
brought. ‘The intense stillness [of dark midnight], broken only by the
baying of the dogs and the “mysterious sounds of the desert” were “pro-
foundly still”’. Only moonlight and stars shed a welcome on the ‘moon-
blanched plains’.
Stars were ‘waning pale’ and ‘dimly sown!’ ‘The camp-fire gleams resis-
tance/To every twinkling star’; lagoons shimmered ‘under a silvery moon’
and wattle blossoms poetically celebrated the ‘golden moonlight it
doth seem’.
Stillness and silence were hallmarks of the colonial landscape, day and
night. Strangely, silence and stillness pervaded the darkness, yet darkness
was inhabited by ‘all those thousand commingled indistinguishable
sounds that make the night-life of the bush, with painful distinctive-
ness … the frogs in the creek, and the rustle of a million crawling things,
heard only in the deep stillness of night’. ‘The stillness was awful’ yet the
air was serene. The wind whispered faint cries, brought the power of
wrath or faint breaths of perfume.
66 D. S. Jones
Wrath was expressed in rain, lightning, and storms: phenomena often

prayed for in summer or late dry season. To the squatter, ‘There was noth-
ing much to be done, but to sit on the verandah, drinking claret-and-
water, and watching and hoping for a thunderstorm’. Thus, ‘we saw the
lightning, not twinkling and glimmering harmlessly about the horizon …
but falling sheer in violet-coloured rivers behind the dark curtain of rain
that hung from the black edge of a teeming thunder-cloud’. And when it
came, ‘The lightning flashed, loud thunder rolled, / And rain incessant
fell’. Ironically, the portend wrath promised sparkling waterholes, buoy-
ant green pastures, and a breath of joyous perfumes and songs.
The scented air often carried wattle perfume, day or ‘cool, transperent
[sic] night’, or was ‘sweet with the scent of hay’. The ‘sweet perfume from
the clover paddocks fills the air, mingling with that from the new-mown
hay’. Foliage provided a familiar perfume in the stillness.
Of Nature’s retribution, only drought and fire figure prominently in
experiential phenomena. The image of drought was powerful in both
Aboriginal and colonial psyche. A homestead that ‘sits in a plain which is
as level as a floor … gray, bare, sombre, melancholy, baked, cracked, in
the tedious long drouths [sic]’, lived in illusions:
‘No rain yet, and we were in the end of January; the fountains of heaven
were dried up’ producing the ‘far sun-scorched drought-accursed wilds’. All
a person could do was sit back and watch for the symbolic clouds.
Stories of bushfires, however, told of awesome majesty: ‘I heard the
mighty crackling of fire … the blinding smoke burst into a million
tongues of flickering flame and I saw the fire … aloft, a hundred and fifty
feet overhead … flying along from tree-top to tree-top like lightning’.
These overwhelming scenes depicting terror and violence in nature
proved too much for von Guérard to grasp in Bushfire between Mount
Elephant and Timboon, March 1857 (1859).
At night, the dark stillness of the starlit sky was mentioned by colo-
nials. Yet the crystal brilliance attached to clear skies and the Milky Way,
in comparison to the northern hemisphere skies, was not normally men-
tioned. Eclipses and falling stars, also, received tacit attention. Aboriginal
mythology, in contrast, placed great importance on star configurations
and symbolism, and treated eclipses and falling stars as cosmic warnings
and signs. Each star, void, and constellation held its own story and mean-
ing, like the landscape they inhabited.
3.3 Rhythms Tapestry

Thus, the Rhythm traits, peculiar to this landscape, are: stories, myths, and
cultural belief constructs have structured the activities and rituals of suc-
cessive human generations in creating a distinctive culturally modified
landscape in this savannah grassland and woodland; animals, often ele-
vated to symbolic status, are strongly linked to natural features in myths
and stories about this landscape; more powerful myths or stories incorpo-
rate and explain unusual natural features in the landscape; seasonal changes
can be discerned by signals in plant and animal flowering, fruiting, repro-
duction, and migratory patterns; cyclical patterns in plant and animal sys-
tems strongly determine human activities and relationships with the
landscape; the strong horizontality of the landscape forced humans to be
more acutely aware of subtle sensory qualities and changes in the environ-
ment, especially to relieve the sense of climatic monotony; the landscape’s
horizontality pushed human focus upwards to be more conscious and
watchful of changing patterns and signs in day and night skies; the sky
radiated a remarkable sense of energy, manifest especially in its light inten-
sity, and in the features of the sun and stars; and, bushfires created a singu-
lar aura of fear and energy about their intensity and presence.
* * *
Baillieu (1982): 102; Benterrak et al. (1984): 13; Berndt (1964):
258–295; ‘Boldrewood’ (1969): 14, 25, 35, 61, 91–92, 94, 101, 110,
198; Bonwick (1970): 37; Chauncy (1972): 234–235; Corris (1968):
41–42; Coutts and Lorblanchet (1982): 85–86; Critchett (1990): 19–29;
Dawson (1981): 49–50, 105–106, 108–109; de Serville (1980): 35, 36;
Doolan (1979); Elliott (1967): 21–23, 65, 163; Fox (1985): 29–36; Gott
and Conran (1991): 6–7, 38, 46, 55; Hay (1981): 6, 11, 14, 24; Hoskins
(1988); Hunt and Willis (1990): 354–355; James (1981): 81; Jones
(1991): 35; Kiddle (1962): 99, 112, 428–429; Kingsley (1952): 119–120,
147, 198–202, 295, 303, 322, 328, 378, 427; Kirkby (1978): 256;
Lawlor (1991): 43; Lawrence (1981): 19, 365; Mack (1988): 61; Massola
(1957): 19; Massola (1961); Massola (1969): 107–108; Michell (1975):
4; Mitchell (1965): vol 1, 159, 333; Pierce (1987): 154, 226, 274;
Poulston (1984); Rappaport (1967): 1; Richardson (1946): 163; Robb
68 D. S. Jones
(1962): 59, 88, 115, 116, 122, 177, 332; Sayers (1970): 41–42; Scarlett
(1988): 146–149; Smyth (1972): 242–243, 423–424, 428, 435–440;
Taylor (1989): 30; ‘Twain’ (1897): 82, 154, 224, 230; Upfield (1991);
Watts 1983; Zola and Gott (1992).
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1840-1850. Hawthorn, Vic: Craftsman Press.
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Dawson, J (1981), The Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of
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ceive ‘easements’ – How do they grant them?, Oceania 49 (3): 161-168.
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William Heinemann, 1970.
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Melbourne, Vic: Oxford University Press.
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Food, Fibre and Healing Plants of Victoria. Melbourne, Vic: Koorie
Heritage Trust.
4
1800–1840: Country Dreaming
4.1 ‘Here Is My Country …; My Barbary’

When asked their country, they beat the ground and vociferated, Deen! deen!
(here! here!), and then, in a dejected tone, bewailed the loss of their country.
Diary entry, June 20, 1841, George Augustus Robinson
* * *
Central within both Aboriginal and Western notions of place is that it has
some form of tangible or intangible but definable edge that dislocates it
from another place. In both also, spatial territory is constituted within
this bounded realm, or composed of sequentially clustered component
spaces that collectively form place: this is a part of the concept of Country.
The difference was that Aboriginal spatial delimitation was more subtle,
often invisible, and commonly tied to geographical features and habi-
tat zones.
Sense of ‘ownership’ to Aboriginals was in their stewardship of a tract
of Country for and on behalf of Dreaming ancestors. Aboriginals belonged
to the landscape rather than the landscape belonged to Aboriginals. While
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_4
72 D. S. Jones
landscape was divided into seemingly obvious Country, it belied that

these territories were multi-layered, variable, and erected around environ-
mental and social resources, and social principles. Such notions are oppo-
site to the spectrum of land ‘ownership’ relationships constructed by
Western civilisations.
Personal identification for Aboriginals was also derived from the con-
ception of place. In their minds, landscape was a wealth of named loca-
tions where time and space fused and where, through the recitation of
spatially anchored myths and tales, their portentous nature was articu-
lated in visual features that influenced human contemplation. Landscape,
place, and human presence were entwined together like the blood, flesh,
and processes of a living organism. Named features, in myths and tales,
served as invaluable mnemonic signposts of moral historical teachings
and cultural principles, and thus this ‘geography’ embodies ‘tactics and
strategies of power’ of ancestors. Individuality was not derived from sex,
race, social class, vocation, or skill, as in the Western world, but derived
from the linkages one held to, and the physical and metaphysical con-
notations contained in the sense of place in landscape.
Landscape, within this nomenclature construct, was a library of knowl-
edge and traditions—a watchful but caring steward of tradition and cus-
tom. It was also a standard upon which cultural principles peculiar to
those languages and landscape depended. Consequently, notions of
‘voices in the darkness’, and spectres of Dreaming landscapes immersed in
phenomena and rituals that haunted colonial invaders, were real selfs.
Carefully cultivated by successive generations, the idea of place endured
in the landscape by tradition: disintegration of clans and their traditions
broke these relationships, but places in the landscape still stalked the
colonial mind.
This section first considers the idea of Country within Aboriginal cul-
ture for the Western District. Before considering these ideas, an under-
standing of Aboriginal relationships to landscape, and its division into
Country’s by ‘clans’ and ‘bands’, is necessary. Second, the section consid-
ers Aboriginal identification and conception of place. The notion of place,
the use and significance of place names, the image of a Country with
mnemonic signposts and songlines, and the identification of places are
topics reviewed. The latter review is, however, frustrating because every
4 1800–1840: Country Dreaming 73
place name, such as Wer.row.wer.rer, disguises a volume of meanings, sto-

ries, and wealth in the fullest sense not documented or comprehended
today comprising the complex functional and dynamic relationships that
bind together all aspects of that culture with the environment.
* * *
All Western conventions of ownership, territory, and definition were

non-existent in the pre-colonial Western District landscape. Indeed, the
word ‘land’ was not referred to by Aboriginals: rather it was translated as
Country, or ‘my Country’. In Djab wurrung, the term was Cha knæk, in
Kuurn kopan noot, it was Mææring an, and in Peek whurrong, Mææring.
Aboriginal expressions of land were transcribed as ‘localities of their
nationality … [as] “country belong to me, country belong to me”, “that’s
my country belonging to me!!”, or, “Here is my country, deen deen—
here here”’. Land, boundary demarcation, and territory were determined
by social conventions:
The territory belonging to a tribe is divided among its members. Each family
has the exclusive right by inheritance to a part of the tribal lands, which is
named after its owner; … When the boundaries with neighbours meet at lakes
or swamps celebrated for game, well-defined portions of these are marked out.
‘Ownership’, or more correctly ‘use’, was by hereditary stewardship of

clan lands. These lands were spiritually linked to Dreaming ancestors, the
‘owners’, by land-based anchorages in myths and tales. Thus, Country was
‘inalienable and non-transferable, held in trust for the mythic beings, and
for human beings: for the dead as well as for the living, and for future
generations’. And Country also invested itself in animals, plants, spirits,
deities, relevant portions of songlines and myths, and the entities within
and below the identified tract of Country, in a holistic relationship.
Country was a collective entity, like an organism, within which humans
were but one participant. This notion was multidimensional, held reli-
gious responsibilities and traditions, and was premised on the ‘perpetua-
tion of species associated with the particular mythic beings linked with
that territory’.
74 D. S. Jones
One … [was] dealing, not with ‘land’, but with ‘country’, land already related
to people … . [O]ne must use at least three categories: clan or descent-group
country often containing disregarded areas; range-country sometimes over-
lapping with other ranges so as to form virtual commonages for a set of groups;
and ‘company’ country between estates and/or domains.
While land was ‘parcelled out among themselves’, its division was by
layered zones that co-related to patrilineal or matrilineal descendancy,
totemic associations, and ecotonal dependency implications. Central to
this layering were the Country’s of the inhabitants—distinct environmen-
tal and economic spatial tracts.
A Country was a patrilineal or matrilineal descent-group or locus com-
prising a wide tract of the landscape with numerous mytho-totemic-
ritually associated sites within. A ‘range’ was a tract of landscape over
which a land-using group, a ‘band’, hunted and gathered to maintain life.
Occupation of the ‘range’ varied according to seasonal variations and sus-
tenance resource availability. ‘Estate and range together may be said to
have constituted a domain which was an ecological life-space’. ‘Life-space’
dependency was a key facet in ‘estate’ existence.
Country also possessed a collective domain of neutral territories, song-
line corridors and installations, and common resource harvesting spaces.
Thus ‘clans’ and land-using groups (‘bands’) comprised the human spatial
territorial units, with collective title to a greater Country, and with over-
lapping ‘ranges’ and ‘partially interpenetrative domains and life-spaces’.
Disregard of boundaries, other than permitted by way of songlines and
collective tracts, was disregard of customs and rules. Boundaries were
demarcated with clear definition according to their purpose: place names
were a key intellectual vehicle in delimitation because names identified
Country and points known to be in possession of a clan, or within their
mytho-totemic management responsibilities. Identification itself there-
fore constituted demarcation, and any natural or geographical feature
could serve as one of many ‘signs’ or ‘fences’ of these boundaries.
Domains of collective ownership also existed. ‘[Lake] K[e]ilambete …
[was] neutral ground’: a place to settle disputes and transact other busi-
ness. Songlines and trade routes were collective tracts enabling the safe
traverse of landscape and contained interconnected and numerous
journey routes and points of cultural interaction. Gnurad [Mt Noorat],

for example, provided an important point of cultural artefact and infor-
mation exchange for ‘clans’ over a wide area. In contrast, participation in
great kangaroo and emu hunts, or in the harvesting of eels around Boloke
and along Salt Creek, was by invitation. The Bulug bara had ‘the exclusive
rights to the fish. No other tribe can catch them without [their] permis-
sion, which is generally granted, except to unfriendly tribes from a dis-
tance’. And at Mirræwuæ [Black Swamp], when a ‘grand battue … [was
planned], messengers were sent all round to invite everybody to join’.
* * *
Because boundaries were well defined, and ‘identification itself was suf-
ficient demarcation’, the material, historical, and symbolic values of
places held ownership identification to particular ‘clans’ and ‘bands’ by
inherited possession. This Country relationship made (and continues to
make) determination of boundaries difficult within Western notions and
documentation practices, especially given contemporary ethnographic,
anthropological, and historical literature. It was also hampered by pho-
netic mistranscriptions in languages, meanings, and descriptions.
Notwithstanding these difficulties a number of principles are still evi-
dent. Language boundaries generally correlate to Country boundaries.
The former has commonality in words and grammatical constructions
linking dialects in chains of mutually intelligible languages. The latter is
the traditional locus containing a site or a series of sites of mytho-totemic
significance where demarcation is a product of the human mind. In these
contexts, a comparative set of boundaries is best derived from reliance
upon both languages and Country’s, of which more is known about the
former than the latter in colonial and contemporary literature.
Boundaries were distinctive, permeable, or extensive. A boundary
could be a part of a tribal focus upon a river and exist, not in the water-
course, but imprecisely somewhere along either of its sides; it could lie
along the distinctive crest of a mountain range; or it could vary from 3 to
16 km wide across an infertile or uninhabited tract of landscape. Line
delineation was aided by clearly distinguishable natural features, isolated
76 D. S. Jones
piles of stones, marked trees, ecological boundaries, or vague invisible

linear mental ‘lines’ between two points in the landscape.
Language boundaries were but one boundary. An aggregate of mutu-
ally intelligible clans was contained within roughly homogeneous
language-Country areas. Individual clans within Country had landscape
boundaries based upon food-quest thresholds. These could be termed the
‘ranges’ of their life sustenance and survival. Burial sites within the
‘estates’—‘sacred sites’ with a senescent nature of significance—were lit-
tered across the landscape. They were clearly identified by either natural
or marked features that involved restricted zones curated by the family of
the deceased person or persons. Sites of mythological significance had no
definite boundaries but were points or loci of concentrated power, based
upon the presence of a Dreaming ancestor that radiated out like gravity.
Such points were equally dependent upon the total surrounding land for
their mythological significance like a sphere of gravity or power.
Laid over these spatial Country’s, except burial sites, were a set of ‘ease-
ments’; routes of travelling mythological Dreaming ancestors. Rights of
passage, in safety, were guaranteed by confinement within an ‘easement’.
This enabled the sharing of benefits derived from the ancestors’ presence,
campsites and tracks, or the products of exchange that were often essen-
tial to life sustenance (e.g. valuable spear wood or shells) or mythological
rituals (e.g. red ochre or narcotic commodities).
Country’s were also variable in their size. The number of mytho-totemic
sites (one to many; simple to complex), and the number and population
of clans relevant to Country’s, illustrates that a range of permutations
were possible in the District.
* * *
Every myth contains earthly anchors, often at the beginning, end, and
during a story in the form of place names. Place names announced a
‘voice’ and bespoke meaning and personality into geographical features.
It was not simply that Wer.row.wer.rer was an appellation for a space on
Tarnpirr [Mt Emu Creek], or that Lehuura meant ‘nose’ (on the northern
peak of Mt Leura), but that there was a metaphysical story or association
behind the feature that linked it to historical tales or the passage of

Dreaming ancestors. To the questions: ‘What does it mean?’, or ‘What is
its name?’, may be varied answers. Lehuura may mean ‘nose’, but nose of
what, and how did the nose happen resulting in the appellation, are the
thoughts prompted by the statement?
Place names therefore held meaning, significance, and motivation, in
their construction and purpose. They also disguised more than what was
simply implied. The latter may be seen with Teerinyillum [Mt Elephant]
which meant ‘sea swallow, or tern … from the flocks of these birds fre-
quenting the marshes in the neighbourhood’, or ‘home of sea terns’, or
‘tern or sea swallow that used to haunt the neighbouring swamps’. These
definitions do not explain the form, position, and symbology of
Teerinyillum. The meanings disguise what was a feature full of latent
properties that was linked to the Teerinyillum myth.
The meaning of a place name held great power. For example, there
could be mythological significance in the name—Purra purra. There was
the celebratory symbolism—was it the uncomprehended appellation of
the kangaroo ancestor? There was a potential historical association—lost
in the colonial mistranscription of the Brolga myth was the Aboriginal
name that identified the location of the fallen River Red Gum on the
Wannon. There was descriptive relevancy—Gnuura buurn buurn may
have pertained to a botanical species near ‘Glenormiston’ but was it the
plant itself, the food of the plant, the place at which the plant grew, or the
purpose to which the plant was used? There again, the name could have
been a plant food that a Dreaming ancestor collected elsewhere, but ate
on the spot. No evidence of the species may be visually recognisable, but
the invisible evidence bound together in a story may have made it rele-
vant. The descriptive potency of a place name was not realised in the
colonial documentation of the literal name of a place. So, the ‘wealth of
“meaning” in the fullest sense’ in every name was lost.
Myths were distinguished by their relevance to the Dreaming and their
design to enlighten or instruct, such as the myth about Murkupang.
Historical tales, in contrast, may only be tied to one point or place
recounting a criticism or a warning. Tales were also about ‘a time long
ago’ and contained warnings or rules about Aboriginal moral behaviour,
such as in the Brolga story. A third type of narrative was the sage where
78 D. S. Jones
the purpose was to entertain an audience about a recent event. An exam-

ple is the Muuruup [devil spirit/‘bullock’] story about the Wuurong yæring
waterhole told by Gnaweeth and Weeratt Kuyuut which ‘afforded the
woman many a laugh at the expense of the men’. In each of the three nar-
rative forms, place names located stories in the landscape, and names
such as Wurrong yæring, Yuumkuurtakk, or Taap heear affixed appellations
to places where events occurred.
Place names in story or myth were the connexions between Aboriginals
and their Country. Or, they could be encoded descriptive referents, literal
or metaphorical, of environmental information. Names such as Kuurn
kuurn muuthang and Kuutoit kill described the ‘little blackwood tree’ and
‘wild parsley’, but had fixed locations at ‘Renny Hill’ and Koroit, respec-
tively. Metaphorical names such as Mortom and Puulorn buurn described
a round spring and a ferny (water) hole below Kolerer [Mt Rouse] and on
the Moyne, respectively.
A name could also hold environmental information, or bear the appel-
lation of features or events in myths, tales, or sages. The motivation to
name it was the same—it was needed to signify or identify a place to
Aboriginals. Mirræwuæ [Black Swamp], Lurtpii [spring below Kolerer],
and Bukkar whuurong [ridge between Bullen meri and Gnotukk] did not
merely describe landscape features. They referred to places of great meet-
ings, mysticism, and mythology, and were also extensive, minute, and
large in scale, respectively. Generic terms, such as swamp, spring, or ridge,
were not normally added because the name itself explained the nature
and meaning of the place. Names of creeks or hills, however, often
denoted the generic feature itself, not the place. Generic names or suffixes
such as yalloak, bara, condeet, gundidj, bulluc, balug, or par, for creeks,
‘camp’ (or ‘dwelling place’), ‘men’, ‘belonging to’ (‘originating from’, or
‘pertaining to’ [a place]), ‘people’, ‘a number of people’, or ‘country of ’,
or ‘water reaches’, however, were applied, respectively.
Place names were individual notes in a larger symphony, each with a dis-
tinct tone—like chants sung in the valley of Wit.ler.be.car.rac near
‘Woodlands’. Like music, place names held expressions of feelings, attitudes,
qualities, and a rich vocabulary of meaning behind their identification.
* * *
On the morning of June 20, 1841, at ‘Merino Downs’ the Chief Protector
of the Aborigines interviewed a group of Aboriginals from the Darkogang
gundidj:
When I asked their names and where the country was [that] they belonged
to … [a] man with emotion struck the ground and said, ‘Here is my country,
deen deen—here here’. And the old woman who had chronicled in her memory
the long long history of her country took up the theme … And then in a dejected
and altered tone deplored the loss of her country and its original enjoyment.
Three facets are illustrated in this outcry. First, the term Country—a
spatial four-dimensional landscape—rather than land or place is consis-
tently used to describe their landscape in transcriptions. Second, there is
an expression of belongingness, of connexions, to the landscape. Third,
an expression of individual relationship or metaphorical connexion to
landscape is implied in the chronicling of landscape associations. These
facets all express an image of place or landscape; the notion of custodian-
ship, although not explored here, would add more facets.
Country was a strong concept, and each family, band, clan, and tribe
viewed a certain tract of landscape as their domain to inhabit and care for.
The terms Cha knaek in Djab wuurung, Mææring an in Kuurn kopan noot,
and Mææring in Peek whurrong, which meant ‘my Country’, illustrate this
point. The term Country was articulated in the pointing to and the nam-
ing of places and features: ‘To this day the older men can clearly point out
the land which their fathers left them and which they once called their
own’. At ‘Mount Mitchell’, it was observed:
And with much emotion and gesticulation, he stood up and, stretching out his
arm, said ‘my country, merygic, barburic, good country’. And verily is so. A
finer country cannot be.
Recitation of place, feature, people, and band names was an important

expression of pride in and knowledge about Country. One’s ‘eyes … glis-
tened … kept chatting about his country and calling out the names of
different locations’. The observation recorded a familiarity with
80 D. S. Jones
internalised images of Dreaming places, and landscape features and for-

mations: names rode in the mind like notes on a song sheet. Collectively,
they were scores about place and landscape, and through songlines could
constitute a re-awaking of Dreaming consciousness relevant for that tract.
An expression of belongingness was also tangible. The chief of the
Tonedidgerer balug at Burumbeep [Mt Burrumbeep] articulated this rela-
tionship in a similar manner. In a transcription:
He was anxiously desirous I should know Burumbeep was his country. Stamping
on the ground, he exclaimed, Country belonging to me; country belonging to
me. My barbary (my country).
There was not a sense of ‘ownership’ in these words, albeit the transla-
tion, but an image that he was caring for, or looking, after that Country
for his Dreaming ancestors. His obligation was one of inherited responsi-
bility to look after places, sites, landscapes, and the physical environment
thereon. Inheritance, because each landscape tract contained features
associative of ‘mythic beings, or deities, who in the Dreaming left part of
themselves there’, and each clan name perpetuated an ‘inherited respon-
sibility for … [the] land’ of that gundidj. Landscape, and places within,
were an inherited repository of resources and knowledge. Appellations
were the written ‘titles’ to clan Country’s, and held the ‘texts’ of the past,
present, and future occupants.
Each family has the exclusive right by inheritance to a part of the tribal lands,
which is named after its owner; his family and every child born on it must be
named after something on the property.
Thus, individual belongingness was further perpetuated in the names

of objects, individuals, and features within an inherited tract of land-
scape, continuing a connexion between Dreaming characters and places.
Dislocation from one’s Country, one’s inheritance, was deeply felt.
From Lake Condah Mission in 1877, one Aboriginal wrote to the owner
of ‘Murndal’:
If you will write to the government for us, and get us off here, I will do work for
you and will never leave you … I always wish … to be in my country, where I
was born … This country don’t suit me I’m a stranger in this country I like to
be in my country.
Intrusion into a Country foreign to one’s clan was also deeply felt:
In 1843 … One of the most intelligent of the Worngarragerra [Wungaragira

gundidj], … said to me indignantly, when remonstrated with for his unfriend-
liness, ‘Mainmait talle, mainmait mirri-par-gar, mainmait nalderrun; yur-
rong,’ that is ‘they are foreign in speech, they are foreign in countenance, they
are foreign altogether—they are no good!’.
Place and landscape identity therefore held an inherited image of one’s

Country. One belonged to a Country or was a mainmait to the occupiers.
An Aboriginal’s image of his Country was reinforced by the vocabulary of
place names he acquired, and the human names and moiety affiliations
he collected, that held metaphysical connexions to Dreaming ancestors or
to aspects within his Country. Knowledge of the meanings and narrative
connexions of place names created identity.
The sense of Country inheritance was continued in clan names. Clan
names celebrated a prominent feature, or one of totemic or symbolic
significance, in the landscape. These were points that identified the ter-
ritorial responsibility and ‘home’ of a particular clan. Condeet, gundidj,
balug, and kuurndit were generic attachments or suffixes to clan names
meaning: ‘member of ’, ‘people belonging to a place’, ‘belonging to’, ‘orig-
inating from’, ‘pertaining to [a place]’, ‘a number of people’, or ‘the peo-
ple belonging here’. Clan names essentially designated and identified a
tract of waark for which a group of people held inherited responsibilities.
These locations denoted clan identification and environmental steward-
ship Country’s. They were another layer of identity appellations attached
to Aboriginal occupancy of waark.
* * *
The notion of the landscape as ‘a fair blank sheet’, unmapped and

unnamed by Aboriginal inhabitants, was an incorrect perception. In the
clan estates of Djab wurrung, Dhauwurd wurrung, Gulidjan, Girai
82 D. S. Jones
wurrung, Djargurd wurrung, Wadawurrung, and Jardwadjali, place names

were more extensive than nomenclature extant today. Orthographic rep-
resentation of nomenclature amongst the different dialects was not an
issue because of the similarity in the tongues and the easy transferability
of stories, personalities, and landscape features and names. Although at
annual meetings, only four languages—‘Djab wuurung, Kuurn kuurn
noot, Wiitya whuurong, and Kolac gnat’—were spoken.
* * *
4.2 Paths Through Grasses

The blacks have regular beaten paths. I met with several on my journey.
Diary entry, July 9, 1841, George Augustus Robinson
* * *
A pathway represents a directional journey through landscape. The notion

of journey is of directed movement in time through space and may com-
prise a person making a journey, an actual path, ‘way’, track or road, or a
direction taken. Metaphorically, journey shifts from a person to a ‘way’ as
the narrative progresses towards religious and existential content.
To Aboriginals, journey was a metaphorical analogy of life. Birth,
death, and renewal were tied up together in the daily cycle, the life cycle,
and the phantasmagorical cycles in the Dreaming. All were meshed
together into a journey into the interior; into the actual landscape and
into the interior of human self. Illustrations of this metaphysical reality
were the Dreaming songlines (pathlines that interconnected places),
which included stopping places of contemplation in life, and provided
neutral pathways for message transmission across waark [open plains].
For example, the myth of Ngindyal, models journeys of life and ‘way’,
and implicit principles and meanings of life. It is but one of a myriad of
criss-crossing walking trails—a metaphysical analogy of the circulation
system in an entity.
This section considers journey and pathways across the landscape,

the waark.
* * *
Songlines represent pathways that ancestral beings used in their attempts

to humanise the landscape, devising the rules and principles of life, in
anticipation of Aboriginal occupance. Coming from every direction (sky,
beek [earth], east, west, etc.), these beings left physical reminders of their
passages and activities, imbuing them with their spiritual presence. The
lines therefore wound through regional and continental landscapes con-
necting constellations of sites forming linear ‘oral literature’ story maps.
Each story comprised a chapter in the Dreaming ‘book’. A Country inher-
ited pieces of this network and the routes were the common responsibil-
ity of all clans. While they also formed neutral pathways of communication
and exchange between clans, it was the quest and opportunity to gain
knowledge of the mythic laws of landscape that was the primary impor-
tance of the lines. The analogy is of an entity:
Each tribe was a stationary expression of the region of earth from which it
emerged; connecting these … was a circulation system called the songlines.
Directed by a complex, unwritten calendar of ceremonies and rituals, tribal
peoples would move along these songlines and interact with people of other
regions … This universal culture was like the blood that unites all functions
and parts of a living organism.
Thus, the myths of Murkupang, Ngindyal, Purra, and the Brambambults

and about Lake Buninjon tell of journeys that may form songlines.
Metaphorically underpinned by hunting activities, they are part of a
larger network of songlines that dissect the waark. They are also anchored
to actual places and features of the landscape where events took place.
Murkupang’s travels down the Hopkins, across waark, aligns itself with a
major cultural exchange and hunting movement corridor; part of
Ngindyal’s path may be recalled in a ‘track’ noticed in the Colonial
Noontide phase; the commencement of Purra’s flight is not stated but
perchance is at his ‘sacred water’ or miyur [spirit land or source] at Pura
84 D. S. Jones
Pura; the Brambambult brothers travels stretched across the ‘estates’ of the
Djab wurrung, Jardwadjali, and Wergaia clans; and the Lake Buninjon
myth tells of a great spiralling ‘pine tree’ to the sky’s ‘starry vault’ that
connected the two domains and the hunting grounds. Each includes
hunting, death, searching, and journeying across diverse landscapes in a
series of interconnected stories and localities. Places acquired appellations
synonymous with passages, or events related thereto. Each place was a
signpost for directional advice that mixed together with oblique physical
and metaphysical references to construct a route map:
Bound by ‘sacred time’, a cyclical and repetitive continuum, Dreaming
characters and their journeys in songlines survived through time by chart-
ing quests for the interior of human self and meaning of where I am.
The remarkable linguistic similarity in terms linked to journey in the
District support. Phonetically similar prefixes (bar-, brar-, par-, tar-, dha-
, tarn-, and bah-) are all linked to meanings, including way, perennial and
ephemeral watercourse flows, and pathways, as analogues of journey.
* * *
Pathways across waark were very common. Well-trampled paths linked

places of exchange, waterholes, great meeting sites, fisheries, and routes
through tall grasses and stony rises. Even around semi-permanent
encampments, beaten paths would have led off towards hunting places,
water, and sources of foods such as poorteetch [Cumbungi] or muurang
[Murnong]. Maps were irrelevant as the landscape held its own signposts,
fabricated and tied together in the songs and myths of the Dreaming, and
the stories and tales of the clan Country’s.
For example, in Gariwerd [The Grampians], a track ran through
Barigar [Rose’s Gap], ‘a wild romantic glen’, under Gar [Mt Difficult]
and along Wartook [Reservoir] ‘and over to the sources of the Glenelg’ in
Billimin [Victoria Range] mirroring Waa’s [the Crow] path of escape,
across Gariwerd, from Ngindyal.
In the tall Kangaroo and Wallaby grasses, there were ‘regular beaten
paths’. Many of these would have been part of a more lengthy and intri-
cate system of pathways that connected fisheries at Cro.cup.per ije
(fisheries below Duwil [Mt William]) or Boloke, and connected trade

points at Gnurad, Boloke linking into path systems in the Buandig,
Jardwadjali, and Wergaia clan Country’s. In the latter two, paths linked
Witchellibah and Banyenong [Lake Buloke] to Barrh, enabling secure pas-
sage to the important meeting place of Werrenjerren [Wirrengren Plain].
Connections from this circuit followed down Barrh past the Cro.cup.per
ije fisheries to meet paths that led to Boloke and Gnurad.
In another example, the myth of Murkupang follows a movement cor-
ridor. This Dreaming identity originally lived on the Hopkins near
Maroona, but journeyed far south nearly to Booruc [Mt Shadwell] along
the Hopkins, creating some of the landscape features within the corridor
including Booruc and Mondilibi. Evidence of this corridor proposition is
supported by the distributional mapping of exchange items that were
transferred from distant Country’s into the Country’s of the Djab wur-
rung, Dhauwurd wurrung, and Girai wurrung, and vice versa. Burumbolak
greenstone diorite artefacts moved north-south along the Hopkins to
Murtoa and Nullaware, respectively. Diorite also moved along the coast
from Ure [Portland] to Robe into Buandig and Meintangk Country’s.
Petrographic analyses show that these artefacts ‘align themselves along the
Hopkins River to the south of the quarry, suggesting that this served as a
line of communication’. A parallel distributional pattern also occurs for
Baronga greenstone diorite. Similarly, numerous Mt William greenstone
artefacts were transferred from the Toolleen locality into Djab wurrung,
Dhauwurd wurrung, and Buandig Country’s, and up into the Jardwadjali
and Wergaia Country’s from the latter two. ‘Maleen’ saplings of Wergaia
mallee, for spears, were also exchanged at Gnurad. Adhesive wattle gum
was brought from Geelong, red ochre from the coastal cliffs of Port
Campbell, ‘bundit’ spear timber from the Cape Otway forests, and
marine shell artefacts were brought from coastal areas to Gnurad, for bar-
ter and exchange. Tarnpirr [Mt Emu Creek] also appears to have been
another north-south pathway.
Regular trade and hunting occasions would make necessary a pathway
system to access compulsory meeting places by representatives. Perennial
water supplies from waterholes or streams, located at an average travelling
86 D. S. Jones
distance of every 8 km, were the locational criteria for major pathways.
Waterholes also guaranteed opportunities for yowwir [bird] snaring or
yapeetch [yabbies] as food sources.
* * *
The right to traverse neighbouring clan Country’s, or to facilitate com-

munication about events and meetings, was deemed a privilege. Message
sticks, messengers, and smoke from fires were other forms of communi-
cation designed to transfer information or to summon bands to clan or
inter-clan meetings and events. Messengers were the bearers of informa-
tion. They told of the time and place of great meetings, corroborees, mar-
riages, burials, battles, and hunts. They tended to travel in pairs and were
always ornamented and painted in ochres displaying the nature of the
information they were conveying. Message sticks conveyed information
to neighbouring bands within a Country. They were normally carried by
two messengers and could comprise a 15 cm long by 2.5 cm stick of five
or six sides with notches indicating the number of bands and men sum-
moned. The stick would be carried, by new messengers, to adjacent bands
until the pictograph summons was satisfied. The purpose of the sum-
mons was not explained.
Spear-throwers were also used as message sticks but the purpose of the
summons was marked on their sides. The notches on one spear-thrower
depicted in the centre of the flat side a 3.5 cm diameter circle represent-
ing a waterhole and camping place called Kuunawarn [presumably Lake
Connewarren] on the east side of Hopkins River. Three notches on the
edge, two lines and two dots on one flat side formed the ‘chiefs’ signature,
and a Z-like incision denoted his presence. Rows of notches leading to
the circle indicated the number of individuals summoned, and the direc-
tions from which they were called. On the rear, two smaller circles and a
pictograph of a munga [hand] (which also meant a meeting) repeated the
summons.
An alternative form of communication was fire smoke. Spiralling
smoke, a characteristic often caused from setting alight a circle of long
grass in a dry swamp, also represented a summons. Similar signals could be
Fig. 4.1 Points on Waark

88 D. S. Jones
achieved from tree hollows stuffed with dry leaves and bark, or fires on top
of hills. Signal smoke, or the representation of it reflected in the sky, was
deemed a compulsory command disobeyed only by the forfeiture of life.
4.3 Points on Waark

Occupance of a landscape also involves the establishment of distinct
points to serve particular needs. Normally for symbolic and cultural pur-
poses, they provide nodes around which one can meet, converse, cele-
brate, exchange, hunt, or create artefacts. They also provide destinations,
places of arrival, or special significance, and were the gateways into myth-
ological domains for Aboriginals. These points—both implicit and
explicit—normally served three main purposes. On waark [open plains],
they comprised cultural gathering places, sacred places, and locations of
daily living patterns.
Figure 4.1 depicts the places mentioned in this section.
Cultural gathering places were points of ritual gatherings or inter-clan
meetings. Often involving food gathering and hunting rituals, and the
exchange of materials and artefacts from different localities, they also
enabled the communication of news, songs, and the re-telling of stories
and myths about waark. Sacred places were points linked to myths and
stories that contained the latent presences of Dreaming ancestors. They
included sites for ceremony, burial, initiation, and ritual for particular
clans, or were mythic gateways to the clouds above or to Ummekulleen
below. Places of daily living patterns focused around semi-sedentary ‘vil-
lages’ or ‘settlements’. Located often near aquatic-based food sources,
they were places where daily activities, including hunting, gathering,
cooking, weaving, and artifice production carried out.
This section sketches the role and importance of these points in com-
munity life. They invested purposeful interaction, discourse, and mean-
ing in the landscape and were the pivots for Aboriginal patterns of living,
rituals, and existence.
* * *
Cultural places held special meaning for Aboriginal life on waark. They
were places of great summer hunts for emus and kangaroos, sources for
the celebratory harvesting of fish and eels in the mid dry and good wet
seasons, points of trade exchange, or places of artifice. On waark, these
points included, in particular, Mirræwuæ [Black Swamp], Tæ rak [Lake
Condah] and Konda [Condah Swamp], Cor.ramut [Caramut], Gnurad
[Mt Noorat], Gilambidj [Lake Keilambete], Boloke [Lake Bolac], the Cro.
cup.per ije swamps below Duwil [Mt William], and the banks of the
Hopkins at Burumboluk [at ‘Berrambool’] and Baronga.
In the late dry season, ‘great meetings were held at Mirræwuæ, a large
marsh celebrated for emus and other kinds of game … The place was
selected on account of its being a central position for the meetings of the
tribes occupying’ waark. ‘None of the sea coast tribes attended … as they
were afraid of treachery and of an attack on the part of the others’. It is
conceivable that Mirræwuæ also facilitated the trading and exchange of
goods from particular Country’s. This may explain why so many Wil-
im-ee moor-ring [Mt William], the ‘home of the tomahawk’, greenstone
hatchets, and axes were diffused across waark deep into Buandig Country’s.
The mid-dry and good wet seasons were periods for fish and eel har-
vesting in the yere.roc [weirs]. Eels were highly prized during the mid-dry
season, on their migration to the sea, and were caught in large numbers
by arrabines [large tapering plaited nets] in yere.roc’s that could ‘accom-
modate the needs of large groups’. Many of the Dhauwurd wurrung clans
would regularly assemble around yere.roc’s and along Darlot’s Creek,
erecting stone structures or hut-like refuges for rain shelter, and feasting
on the supplies of migrating eels and fish.
Boloke was considered the most important centre on waark. Its abun-
dant and nutritious eels in the mid-dry season were deemed a rich and
valuable food source, ‘during the eeling season, from eight hundred to
one thousand Natives at one time have been seen; … These masses are a
collection of or representative of tribes, and the eeling … seasons are
wisely taken advantage of by them for holding their great social and polit-
ical meetings’.
When the mid-dry season rains came and the eels migrated, Aboriginals
gathered around Boloke and along the banks of Salt Creek from Tuureen
tuureen, ‘from great distances. Each tribe has allotted to it a portion of the
90 D. S. Jones
stream … and the usual stone barrier is built by each family, with eel
basket in the opening’. A linear ‘village’ was constructed along the Creek,
often as far down as ‘Merrang’, for one to two months, enabling oppor-
tunities for inter-clan ceremonies and social gatherings, and the chance to
barter and exchange goods including Burumboluk and Mt Stavely
greenstone.
Beneath Duwil was a vast fishery system of an ‘area of at least 15 acres
[6–7 ha]’, called Cro.cup.per ije, constructed to harvest eels.
The whole reminded me of the extensive circumvaliations of, in miniature,

Chatham Lines … These works must have been executed at great cost of labour
to these rude people the only means of artificial power being the lever … a stick
chisel … On first seeing these works the VDL native was struck with amaze-
ment and [… illegible hand written phrase] exclaimed ‘Tar le winem paner
wirngarnly tarnadudd—Oh dear, look at that. Black fellow never tired.’ To
me it was new and particularly interesting and evinced great perseverance and
industry on the part of these Aborigines.
Around these fisheries were numerous mirnyongs [dry camping posi-

tions] and oven mounds indicating that the site, during the mid dry sea-
son, may have regularly been frequented by Djab wurrung, Wadawurrung,
and Jardwadjali clans. Fisheries at Tæ rak and Toolondo, like Cro.cup.per
ije, all required customary maintenance labour to continue their use and
to manage the places as eel and fish farms.
Cor.ramut, on Muston’s Creek, was often the site of great kangaroo and
emu hunts in the late dry season. ‘When it had been agreed by the chiefs
of the associated tribes to have a great battue, messengers were sent all
round to invite everybody to join. As each tribe left its own country’ a
strategic hunt arrangement was applied to entrap the game. ‘In the eve-
ning a grand feast and korroboræ ended the day’s sport. Next morning
the game was fairly divided, and each tribe started homewards, with the
usual “wuwuuk, wuwuuk”, farewell, farewell’.
Periodically, great trading and bartering meetings, where clan repre-
sentation was compulsory, were held at Gnurad. ‘In that locality the for-
est kangaroos are plentiful, and the skins of the young ones found there
are considered superior to all others for making rugs’. But it was items
made from greenstone, mollusc shells, sapling timber, cord or net, reeds,
or Grass-tree caudex that were treasured. Exchange compensated for eco-
logical and resource deficiencies in their ‘estates’, but also, again, it per-
mitted the diffusion of songs, dances, and place names.
Gnurad appears to have been a major exchange point for the highly
prized diorite greenstone from Wil-im-ee moor-ring, and Daung wurrung
and Wurundjeri Country’s, given its extensive diffusion throughout waark.
Greenstone from the Burumboluk and Baronga quarries, however, only
moved westwards from Djab wurrung into Buandig Country. Greenstone
from Dogs Rocks and Ceres, near Geelong, in Wadawurrung Country was
also traded westwards into the District. Stone from the Jallukar quarries,
in Boner balug clan territory within Djab wurrung Country, was also
traded mainly southward into Dhauwurd wurrung Country. A small
amount of black chert and diabase greenstone was also quarried from Mt
Stavely in Djab wurrung Country.
Non-stone goods were largely hunting, gathering, and painting equip-
ment and supplies. Mallee saplings, the rare ‘bundit’ wood, the caudex
stalks of ‘Black-boys’ from the Wergaia, Ganubanud, and Gulidjan
Country’s provided timber for spears, leeowils, and spear-throwers. These
were often exchanged for kangaroo and possum skins, Burumboluk green-
stones, chert, quartz, obsidian, hatchets and hatchet stones, red ochre
from the Otway sea cliffs, and mollusc shells from sandy shores along the
Hopkins River. The scope of trade goods, coming from Country’s over
200 km away, indicates that Gnurad was one of the most significant
exchange centres in south-eastern Australia.
Gilambidj was deemed a meeting place for settling quarrels and dis-
agreements. ‘Keilambete is neutral ground. The tribes met here to settle
their disputes and transact other business connected with their political
relation’. Its convenient location, near a fresh water spring, below Gnurad,
and in the centre of Girai wurrung clan Country, proved an ideal location
for camping.
The greenstone quarries of Burumboluk and Baronga on the Hopkins
River, in Gnareeb gnareeb gundidj clan Country—on ‘Nareeb-nareeb’,
‘Fernlea’, ‘Chatsworth House’, and ‘Berrambool’ stations—were major
artifice sites on waark. Several diorite outcrops and deposits occur along
the Hopkins and Grays Creek bear extensive grinding groove traces
92 D. S. Jones
indicating that this industry must have occurred over numerous genera-
tions. The quarries primarily supplied waark clans as ‘sixty percent of
Berrambool specimens [analysed] are confined within 100 km from the
source’.
* * *
Sacred sites were places of great mythological significance to clans. They

often embodied resting or stopping places of Dreaming ancestors, places
of celebration, initiation, burial or cremation, or places where ‘oral litera-
tures’ of totemic deities were communicated. Although being special
places to the Djab wurrung, Dhauwurd wurrung, Djargurd wurrung,
Wadawurrung, Girai wurrung, and Gulidjan clans, little is recorded of
their numbers, purpose, and the rationale behind their selected locations.
There were three types of sacred sites: ochre painted shelters, stone align-
ments or earthen creations, or those that used geographical features as
mytho-totemic anchorages in myths about Dreaming ancestors.
Shelters were places infrequently visited. Visitation often coincided
with repeated or new ochre layers being applied to shelter faces, normally
at times of ceremony or initiation. The shelters of ‘Bunjil’s Cave’, in
Burrong [Black Range], ‘The Cave of the Serpents’, below Larneejeering
[Mt Langi Ghiran], and those in Gariwerd [The Grampians] (such as
Janang-en-yawiwe [‘The Camp of the Emu’s Foot’], or at Yananginj Njawi
[Victoria Gap] and Billimina [‘Glenisla Shelter’] in Billawin [Victoria
Range]) are illustrative of this type. They contain motifs and images
whose purposes and meanings are now only conjecture.
The second form of sacred sites were places created as part of and to
enable some form of either ceremony or initiation process. Stone align-
ments at Lake Wongan, ‘Glenaber 1’, and ‘Glenaber 2’, are ascribed to
bora and ceremonial functions, whereas the earthen sculpture of the
Bunyip at ‘South Challicum’ recalls a historical tale that was adapted into
an initiation story. The lava sink-hole of Pura Pura, and the ‘Spirit Cave’
at ‘The Craigs’, link Purra’s miyur or ‘sacred water’, and a funereal totemic
centre, to points in the landscape where certain ceremonies were infre-
quently performed. The latter forms acted as mythological anchor places.
Burial sites were the most deceptive of landscape creations. Some qual-
ified as landscape art by their earthwork beauty, associative iconography
on trees or earth, or subtle arrangement. Their qualities and ceremonial
purposes, however, were extremely important to Aboriginals and illus-
trate a ‘peculiarly stable and ancient human order’, holding a great deal of
inscription of meaning on the landscape. Respectfully, they are not dis-
cussed in this text.
* * *
Centres of daily living activities were common as they comprised places

of semi-permanent or ‘traditional’ (or base) camps. These places were
often in the centre of points of Country’s or were activity focal points for
each land-using ‘band’. They could, occasionally, also include special
camp sites linked to annual meetings for exchange, hunting, fishing, or
ceremony within and across Country’s.
Base camp sites were selected with deliberate consideration for aquatic,
gathering, and hunting resources within that particular ‘range’. Sites were
commonly near to creeks, rivers, swamps, or lakes, with access to peren-
nial or seasonal food types and other resources: sites at junctures of a
number of micro-environments appear to have been preferred. Frequency
of occupation was both annual and occasional, depending upon the
abundance, diversity, and reliability of food resources, or the incidence of
death at the site previously. Exceptions were sites near to fisheries, weirs,
canal systems, or perennial water pools, where the harvesting and main-
tenance of swamp systems required semi-permanent settlements. Regular
harvesting periods also resulted in repeated seasonal occupation of spe-
cific landscape points. Mounds and stone structures at these sites appear
to be adaptations to micro-climatic issues. These include ensuring well-
drained house or camp platforms, especially from the good wet to early
dry seasons, the build-up of litter from camp fires, food preparation and
decomposition of shelter construction materials at camp sites, and
repeated firings of camp sites. These camp sites also experienced nutrient
accumulation and enrichment by gentle firing and defecation of seeds
and berries around sites. Water logging of ground, due to the ‘high per-
centage of clay in the soils derived from the basalt’, forced adaptation
94 D. S. Jones
towards mounds. This permitted a ‘more intensive settlement of the

region’ because ‘settlements need no longer be restricted to the well-
drained lunettes’.
Mounds and camp settlements were illustrative of Aboriginal societal
organisation. A semi-sedentary pattern of life—termed ‘complex hunting-
gatherers’—was in place. It was characterised by inter-clan and inter-
band cultural activities for ceremonial, exchange, political, and hunting
purposes. Thus, labour was more organised and concentrated to enable
the construction, maintenance, and management of swamp drainage and
fisheries systems that guaranteed the harvesting of seasonal food resources.
This arrangement also ensured abundant food resources throughout the
year, and a dietary safety net of inter-clan arrangements that guaranteed
food resource sharing in times of peak production or during prolonged
absences such as drought. The establishment and continued use of village
arrangements were therefore an extension and a consequence of this pat-
tern of living for complex hunter-gatherers. Within this anthropological
concept, groups ‘live in sizable settlements which are often termed vil-
lages; construct large, durable structures; and manipulate the environ-
ment in ways that alter the availability or abundance of resources’.
At ‘Green Hills’,
there was … a regular Aboriginal settlement … There was on the banks of the
creek between 20 and 30 huts of the form of a Beehive or sugar loaf, some of
them capable of holding a dozen people. These huts were about 6' high [182.8
cm] or [a] little more, about 10’ [304.8 cm] diameter, an opening about 3' 6"
[106.6 cm] for a door which they closed at night if they required with a sheet
of bark, an apeture at the top 8 or 9’ [20 or 23 cm] to let out the smoke which
in wet weather they cover’d with a sod. These buildings were all made of a
circular form, closely worked and then covered with mud, they would bear the
weight of a man on them without injury [sic].
Locations, near permanent water enabling easy access to fish and eel
supplies, near bush cover suitable for bird snaring, near supplies of root
plant foods especially the swampy habitat of poorteetch [Cumbungi], or
on high ground enabling a good vantage, appear to be criteria for settle-
ment establishment.
The Tappoc gundidj occupied a place on a creek, ‘a favourite resort …

as this was the only permanent supply of water, [where] a village had been
formed. I counted 13 large huts built in a form of a cupola … When seen
at a distance they have the appearance of mounds of earth’. At Murroa
[Buckleys Swamp], ‘I passed at least 20 well built worns or native huts.
Some were placed near the river, others on aclivity of the hills, and some
on the top of an eminence’. A large ‘village’ of mounds was recorded near
to the Cro.cup.per ije fisheries: ‘there were at least a dozen in the immedi-
ate neighbourhood’. Around Mirræwuæ, ‘large clusters of mounds (more
than six) were restricted to those areas of high ground with good vantage,
which were bounded by creeks on two sides and often by a swamp on
the third’.
The Nillan gundidj, south of Murroa, ‘had a sort of village, and some
of their habitations were of stone’. At ‘Green Hills’: ‘this rich spot was the
abundant fishing and favourite ground [of the Omebegare rege gundidj] …
We could … see by the great numbers of bridges along the large water-
holes and the large numbers of woven fences erected across the shallow
portions of the Creek, for the purpose of erecting their nets, that the
natives were numerous’. At Boloke, the ‘native’s tracks on the beach were
as thick as sheep tracks … [I] saw a vast number of old native encamp-
ments and huts … The top of the sand bank and at the base of the bank
on the edge of the lake, were the sites chosen’. The Yowen gundidj estate,
on ‘Tarrone’ and the Moyne, ‘was a favourite spot’ for Aboriginals. ‘It was
the home of several families. (…) took me to several spots where he had
resided and had worns or huts. He also took me to a very fine and
large weir’.
Clusters of mounds, or village sites, were common across waark. To
the Djab wurrung, they were called pok yuu, to the Kuurn kopan noot,
they were po’ok, and to the Peek whuurong, they were puulwuurn. They
‘were the sites of large, permanent habitations, which formed homes for
many generations’.
The great size of them, and the vast accumulation of burnt earth, charcoal, and
ashes which is formed in and around them, is accounted for by the long con-
tinuance of the domestic hearth, the decomposition of the building materials,
and the debris from their frequent destruction by bush fires. They never were
96 D. S. Jones
ovens, or original places of interment, as is generally supposed, and were only

used for purposes of burial after certain events occurred while they were occu-
pied as sites for residences—such as the death of more than one of the occupants
of the dwelling at the same time, or the family becoming extinct.
Points for daily living activities were present throughout waark, and in
the stony rises, wherever abundant food resources and reliable water sup-
plies were prevalent. They illustrate a ‘complex hunter-gatherer’ relation-
ship with the landscape and validate the thesis that Aboriginals were, in
this District, a semi-sedentary culture contrary to European notions that
they had a nomadic roaming culture.
4.4 Scoria, Bough, and Leaf

There is a peculiar feature in this country called ‘stony rises’ there is a rise in the
ground like a great reef jutting above the surface, but instead of that it is a great
collection of boulders of bluestone resembling the whin stone at home and of
igneous origin.
Letter, November 24, 1867, George Henderson, Rokewood, to Susan
Henderson, Edinburgh
* * *
In the Country of the Yowen gundidj, at Par-woor-deet [Moyne River falls]

lies the lagoon of Tow.wer.deet.mole, ‘a favourite resort of the natives’.
There is a fine clean lagoon at this place and the best water I have tested in this
district … There are fish in this lagoon, eels and round the banks I counted 6
places the native had made for fishing, … round the edge of the lagoon sup-
ported by fork sticks. I also saw a weir across the river for catching eels. This
place, Pat.wor.deet, is a very romantic spot. The rocks at the falls are windstone
[sic]. The scrub is rather thick near to the lagoon, good shelter for the natives
and a screen from wind.
The volcanic nature of the landscape provided the forms in which to

construct refuges from micro-climatic effects and to harvest its aquatic
and faunal resources. Scoria littered the landscape, providing the material
for Aboriginals to construct weirs and fisheries in swamps and water-
courses. It also enabled shelter from the daunting strength of winds on
waark [open plains] or from the rains near the fisheries. The basaltic
stone, when cut and quarried, later comprised the ‘bluestone’ used in
colonial building construction. Timber and bark fashioned in lightweight
frames, and often ‘thatched’, provided the alternative medium for shelter
from wind, rain, and shine.
This section reviews the human structures created on the landscape,
from its physical constitution. Shelters, in forms of windbreaks, stone
huts, and timber structures, that provided human refuges from rain,
wind, and summer heat are considered. These constructions often
required the use of edging and walling, the delineation of space, to pro-
vide nests for human and aquatic resource habitation. The material was
the bluestone scoria rubble. The objective of both was to create micro-
climates comfortable for human and animal occupation and reproduction.
* * *
Yere.roc, shelter, or wuurn [hut-like shelters] construction displayed a

marked simplicity but ingenuity in the use of indigenous materials to
provide refuges from micro-climatic effects. There was diversity in their
types, and variation according to available materials and exposure to
wind, rain, and shine.
Wuurns included permanent, temporary, late dry season, and good wet
season shelters, and some were erected just for hunting outings. The sim-
plest were bark and sapling tent-like shelters that provided shade and
opportunities for breezes were ideal in late dry seasonal conditions. More
elaborate shelters included the use of ‘thatching’ with branches, earthen
depressions excavated and partially covered with boughs and bark like
alpine dug-outs, or the application of turf to thatched sapling branches
over frames. Semi-permanent structures were also tent-like but ‘wattle
and daubed’ plastered on reed and bark frames with mud, or mud-
plastered bee-hive shapes with a central aperture for fire smoke. Turf was
98 D. S. Jones
also applied, instead of mud, to timber frames. An advanced form of

housing involved loose scoria or basalt sheets in low circular stone walls,
roofed by bark and saplings, with a fireplace within. On waark, many
circular stone enclosures were also constructed from loose scoria and
basalt sheets as shelterbreaks from the wind.
Key design elements were narrow doorways, verandahs or similar,
smoke apertures, and some form of waterproofing by grass, mud, clay, or
turf sod application. These design elements, for all types of wuurns, were
subject to seasonality and the permanency of encampment:
The principal [wuurn] one is the permanent family dwelling, which is made of
strong limbs of trees stuck up in dome-shape, high enough to allow a tall man
to stand upright underneath them. Small limbs fill up the intermediate spaces,
and these are covered with sheets of bark, thatch, sods, and earth till the roof
and sides are proof against the wind and rain. The doorway is low, and gener-
ally faces the morning sun or a sheltered rock. The family wuurn is sufficiently
large to accomodate a dozen or more persons; and when the family is grown up
the wuurn is partitioned off into apartments, each facing the fire in the centre …
The latter was a more extensive and uncommon variety of wuurn, in

scale and potential, yet some were erected. Simple, semi-permanent wuurns
were more common across waark, as observed south of Boloke [Lake
Bolac]. Along the eeling resort of Salt Creek, and around Boloke, tempo-
rary wuurns were constructed from ‘small light wood and box tree … over-
hanging branches … [with] thatch laid on the top of the branches or
crown’. Near Tappoc [Mt Napier], ‘13 large huts built in a form of a
cupola … [were made] of large sticks closely packed together and covered
with turf, grass side inwards’. Some had two entrances, and some were
tent-like constructions of boughs and grass or as screens. ‘Permanent
huts … [were] those in form of a cupola’; or a ‘“kraal” [where] a strong
frame of wood is first made, and whole covered with thick turf ’. Also near
Tappoc was a ‘large double hut, 10 feet [3 m] diameter with two entrances
and 4 ft [1.2 m] high in centre’. Near Digby, wuurns were ‘lagged and
turfed’ with two apertures, and near Moutajup, they were ‘in part cut out
of the ground and covered with boughs’. The latter was similar to examples
in Koroite valley where a fine vantage point accommodated ‘a large hollow,
10 or 15 feet [3.0 or 4.5 m] in diameter and 3 feet [0.9 m] in depth’.
These designs, peculiar to south-western Victoria, were illustrative of

wet weather protection and semi-permanency considerations and indica-
tive of the semi-sedentary ‘complex hunter-gatherer’ mode of living.
Their siting also varied between lakeshores, tops of lake lunettes, on hill-
sides, or on tops of rises; many positions were marked by mounds. Timber
was the usual structural building material in open woodland and forested
areas. It was covered with cut lengths of bark stripped from box and
stringybark eucalypts, often plaited and encased with saplings before a
‘thatching’ of mud, clay, or turf sides was applied.
In the stony rises, and upon waark, loose basaltic scoria provided the
usual building material. Timber was more prized, unless prolific, as fire-
wood. At Lake Gorrie, ‘some of their habitations were [possibly] of stone’.
Scoria stone circular houses, roofed with boughs and bark, were known
to have been erected around Tæ rak [Lake Condah], and at ‘Kinghorn’,
Puutch been [Mt Eccles], and Bessiebelle. Consisting of 3.0 to 6.0 m
diameter semi-circular or U-shaped forms, with low scoria stone walls of
varying height and a fireplace near the entrance (inside or outside), they
tended to face north-east away from the prevailing winds. They also
tended to be clustered into ‘hamlets’ of several ‘band’ units, although
isolated structures were recorded. On waark, ‘rude stone-circles merely
for the purpose of shelter from the keen winds’ were constructed from
loose scoria stone, often with flat basalt sheets 60.9–91.4 cm wide. They
were circular in form, 3.0–6.0 m in diameter, with an opening towards
the east, and a fireplace within. Fires were small due to the distinct lack
of firewood on waark.
* * *
Stone was also used in two other applications. One was for artifice, the
other was to disguise water springs or wells.
Lithic scatter sites of largely unprovenanced stone artefacts are today
very common across waark. Varying in size, from a few square metres to
several hundred square metres, they were often located next to perennial
water systems. Scatter sites indicate places of stone material manufacture,
repair, and use in the daily activities of hunting and gathering.
Hammerstones, anvils, cores, and debitage, greenstone flakes, hatchet
100 D. S. Jones
head blanks, and sandstone grinders, stone tool and axe manufacture and
repair locations and quarry sites were prolific. At others, basalt and sand-
stone grindstones suggest ochre and plant food processing, while imported
coastal flint, Gariwerd sandstone, non-local cherts and chalcedonies, and
Wil-im-ee moor-ring [Mt William and Mt Camel in central Victoria]
greenstone at sites validate the premise that extensive trade and exchange
networks existed across waark throughout Djab wurrung, Dhauwurd
wurrung, Girai wurrung, Gulidjan, Djargurd wurrung, and Buandig clan
Country’s.
Major sites of artifice included the greenstone diorite quarries of
Burumboluk [Berrambool] and Baronga on the Hopkins River near
‘Berrambool’ and ‘Chatsworth House’. Irregular masses of protruding
sandstone provided grinding blocks for the greenstone axe ‘blanks’ that
had been retrieved from quarries within and along the Hopkins’ banks.
Stones were collected, fired, before being doused with cold water causing
them to ‘explode’ and fracture. The sharp chips and flakes were then
ground, often with abrasive watered dust to assist the process, on the
blocks to form prized spear, axe, and hatchet heads.
Springs, on waark or in the open woodlands, were a highly prized
asset, as the myth about Taarwill [the Australian Bustard], Chirmp-
chirmp [the Lark] and Kuutchon [the Brolga] demonstrates. Regular late
dry season camps were established around these sites and to be deprived
of them forced ‘bands’ to relocate to other perennial sources. Near Tappoc:
At a clump or copse of tea tree [I] saw a native well, about 2½ [76.2 cm] deep
and water. The hole was about a foot [30.4cm] wide at top. To get the water
out of such holes the drinking reed is indispensable. Beside which, the water can
be obtained without disturbing the sediment. Grass is laid in the well and the
water filters through it.
4.5 Dancing Fires in Grasses

The country appears to be thickly inhabited, fires seen in all directions but no
natives. Near encampment, to our great delight beheld the head of the Wannon
[Grange Burn], and the commencement of that splendid country mentioned as
so superior to the cowpasture … The Bronze-Winged Pigeon has recommenced
its notes and the Yellow Buttercup which I saw nowhere but in the rich valley
of the Wannon.
Journal entry, September 10 [sic, 11], 1836, Granville Wilson Chetwynd
Stapylton Journal, 1836.
* * *
The arrangement of threads in the landscape comprises its vegetative

character. The ground plane shares a carpet of trees, plants, and grasses
with red, mottled yellow, and blackened clayey soils. In the carpet, there
are serpentine swaths and colours that vary depending upon the season,
soil, aspect, topographical form, and landscape characters. The patterns
provide the colours, foods, medicines, fibres, and the raw materials to
shelter human and animal occupants of waark [plains], the stony rises,
and the foothills.
This landscape is distinguished by its savannah character:
The general character of the Western District south of the mountains is flat with
a few isolated Volcanic Hills and is composed within two natural divisions, the
wooded and the plains.
But on this flat surface were ‘open grassy plains’, ‘picturesque lakes …
fringed with luxuriant shrubs’, ‘strips of forest’, ‘excellent grass’, and
‘enormous trees of the mimosa or wattle’. Myths and the practice of gath-
ering plant foods and medicines established a seasonal relationship of
caring for those patterns. ‘Agricultural’ or ‘natural gardening’ practices by
Aboriginals through soil preparation, burning of grass covers, thinning,
and plant diffusion, enabled the continued seeding, flowering and regen-
eration of plant species. Such practices, started some 60,000 years ago,
also constituted a cultural impact upon vegetation that dictated its con-
stitution, density, diversity, and the regimen of fire dependent species.
Cultural precepts fostered a relationship dependent upon the regular nur-
turing and maintenance of ecological systems to ensure that adequate
foods and fruits were available for Aboriginal occupants, and in anticipa-
tion of Dreaming ancestors.
102 D. S. Jones
Fig. 4.2 Places on Waark

This section profiles the vegetational patterns of waark, and adjoining

areas. It then sketches Aboriginal uses and relationships with these pat-
terns in mythology, gathering practices, ‘fire-stick farming’ activities, and
the sustenance and medicinal properties in plant materials.
* * *
The vista, which Mitchell romanticised in 1836, of ‘flowery plains and

green hills’ with ‘very rich black soil, apparently the best imaginable, for
the cultivation of grain’, disguised the diverse and complex vegetation
structure of this savannah landscape. The vista was also seen as one that
could be tamed for the colonial settler:
Here is a country which infallibly will be inhabited ere long. The settler will
have no timber to clear away, the soil, fruitful in the extreme and the pastures
for flocks and herds rich and unbounded to an immense extent. Plenty of water,
in short, it has not a drawback or objection belonging to it.
To Europeans the view was of grasslands and open park-like wood-

lands well-served by water, but to Aboriginals it was a more complex
entity. Landscape contained spaces and volumes, and overlapping fields
that were defined more by activity, myth, and food resource abundance
than by aesthetic considerations. A distinguishing feature of this land-
scape, highly modified by generations of Aboriginals, was its treeless-
ness—much of the grassland was ‘strongly antagonistic to trees’; a
characteristic assisted by heavy clay soils, insolation, and the frequent
drying winds peculiar to the landscape.
Apart from the open savannah tussock grasslands, there were three
other habitats. These comprised open forest on the stony rises, riparian
habitats along fresh watercourses, and fresh and saline habitats around
standing water bodies. Aboriginal relationships to land, other than the
traditions inherent in their myths and ‘oral literatures’, were influenced
by these four ecological units. Patterns of flowering, burning, hiberna-
tion, and seasonal drought all affected choices of camp location, hunting,
gathering, fishing and movement.
104 D. S. Jones
In the early dry season, Aboriginals located their camps around drying
swamps and on dry mounds as good wet seasonal rains ceased and soils
evaporated excess moisture. The golden dandelion-like flowers of muurang
[Murnong] bloomed and its roots were collected. Other tuberous food
plants that flowered included parm [Bulbine Lilies], creamy popoto
[Milkmaids], purple Chocolate Lilies, Early Nancy, Greenhoods, taaruuk
[Small-leaved Clematis], and the fruits of blue-purple mookitch [Kangaroo
Apple], corollas and orange-red palatt [Cherry Ballart], and spiked flower
stalks. Hedge Wattles, Prickly Moses, muutchung [Blackwood], and kar-
rank [Golden Wattle] warmed with profuse yellow-golden flowers, and
wuurak [Silver Banksia], Ranunculus, Helichrysum and Ozothamnus spp.,
and Tree Violet flowers were also in bloom. The mookitch and palatt pro-
duced yellow-orange and orange-red edible fruits, and the wuuloitch,
Wallaby, and Spear grasses billowed in silver and red tinted waving
inflorescences.
In the late dry season, muurang was still being harvested, and grasses
continued to flower. This time was considered ‘the unfavourable season’
due to water scarcity. Aboriginal dietary focus was upon abundant kanga-
roos and emus herds. The wuurott [Manna Gum] exuded its sap and the
sugary Lerp (or Larp) was collected from its leaves. Other flowering food
plants included yellow Everlastings, Blue Devils, Austral Bluebells,
magenta Purple Loosestrife, pink tarook [Pink Bindweed], greenish fluffy-
headed Pussy-tails and Featherheads. Also flowering were the cream-
yellow-golden Lightwood, karrank, warrarakk [Late Black Wattle],
wuurak, and kuukee karann [Sweet Bursaria], with the Prickly Tea-tree
and palatt in whitish and greenish flowers. Other food and fibre plants
available for harvest included young poorteetch, Marsh Club-rush, pue-
wan [Potato Orchid], Inland Pigface, and the orange-yellow fruit of
mookitch with its blue-purple hued flowers.
During the mid-dry season, Aboriginals favoured campsites above
watercourses and around swamps. Muurang roots were still harvested,
but dietary attention was upon mo’om [fish] and puunyart [freshwater
eels]. Only the minute peeal [River Red Gum] flowers, the scented white
or pink Silky Hakea flowers, and the greenish flowers of palatt bloomed
in a landscape that was drying out.
During the good wet season, Aboriginals camped on mounds and

well-drained positions near to mo’om and puunyart sources. Plant foods
were limited. Only peeal and Silky Hakea continued to flower; the palatt
produced its orange-red fruit, and karrank, Prickly Moses, and muutc-
hung produced pale creamy-golden flowers. The starchy roots of tarook
were an important alternate to muurang during this season.
The practice of natural agriculture was essential for the continued har-
vesting of the staple food plants of muurang and poorteetch. The use of
vegetation fibres and wood for the shaping of basket wares, and hunting
and gathering equipment, were also linked to this practice. Firing of
landscape tracts to stimulate vegetation regeneration was an instrument
of this practice, and indicative of Aboriginal responsibilities to care for
the landscape. Plant collection and processing were the prerogative of
women and children, but firing could be carried out by male or female
Aboriginals.
Muurang, collected over the early to mid-dry seasons by digging in
waark with long digging sticks, translated as ‘muurang poles’, was an
important ‘staple article of sustenance. It is very nutritious and tolerably
palatable. They roast them in ovens … The white’s call them yams. The
root might be cultivated in gardens’. The long digging sticks were about
2 m long and 2–3 cm thick. They were regularly maintained by
lava stone … for sharpening the murnong stick. I saw one of them at work
preparing the murnong stick. This they do by first chopping with tomahawk or
other sharp instrument the stick, giving to it a dual edge. They then harden it
in the fire and give it a finishing touch with lava stones. Lar, iron stone.
Women, with children in tow, regularly procured muurang from

waark, as well as other tuberous roots including ‘Parm—like an onion’.
Today the native women were spread over the plain as far as I could see them,
collecting Panmin, murnong … I inspected their bags and baskets on their
return and each had a load as much as she could carry.
Tuberous roots were collected in bags or baskets, ‘neatly wove in

basket-work, and composed of a wiry kind of rush’. The ‘cichoraceous
106 D. S. Jones
plant … [muurang was] usually found growing on the plains with a bright
yellow flower’ that made the species easy to find without firing. Tuberous
roots were washed and then laid in rush-work baskets in ground ovens for
steaming or roasting for eating. This cooking method also imposed con-
siderable labour upon the women, ‘inasmuch as the baskets are made by
them; and as these often get burnt, they rarely serve more than twice’.
Basket weaving was an important activity. Women often wove the vigor-
ous longitudinal fibrous stems of poong’ort [Sedges] split into fine strips,
from strong kærk leaves, or from long smooth fibrous leaves of walritch
[Spiny-headed Mat-rush]. Reddish colours were added by including leaves
of the variable Sword-sedge. One significant product of basket weaving
was the design and fabrication of arrabines, usually from walritch. An
extremely important weaving construction, they enabled the extensive har-
vesting of puunyart and mo’om during the good wet and mid-dry seasons.
Stream flows were manipulated, diverting ‘the current through an opening
into a funnel-mouthed basket pipe, three or four feet [91.4 or 121.9 cm]
long, two inches [5.1 cm] in diameter, and closed at the lower end’.
The eel pots are placed over the holes, and the fisher stands behind the yere.roc
or weir and lays hold of the small end of the arrabine or eel pot … made of bark
or plaited rushes with a willow round mouth and having a small end to prevent
the eel from rapidly getting away.
Fishing arrabines or baskets varied in form and fabrication. Some were

‘about eight or ten feet [243.8 or 304.8 cm] long, made of rushes in the
form of a drag-net’, and some were shaped like a dredge, ‘five feet [152.4
cm] long and 18 inches [45.7 cm] deep’.
Apart from being used in baskets and nets, plants also provided raw
materials for hunting and gathering equipment. Materials, such as Mallee
saplings, ‘bundit’ wood, and kawee [Grass Tree] stalks, were imported for
the manufacture of spears. Artefacts, including spears, clubs, axes, knives,
boomerangs, and water containers were the most common forms of items
manufactured from organic materials.
Spears were often ‘jagged’, bone-tipped, or ‘barbed … with convexed
barbs’ and ‘made out of the solid wood and polished’. Clubs varied in
sizes from multi-purpose walking sticks to larger forms: ‘one of a formi-
dable size, called a wuæ whuitch, which is always made of heavy wood,
and is about two feet and a half [76.2 cm] long, with a broad almond-
shaped end, about a foot [30.4 cm] long, terminating in a sharp point’.
Axes were of split saplings with the wedge-shaped stone affixed by kanga-
roo sinews and adhesive wattle gum. Wood boomerangs varied in size
and purpose. Water buckets, called popæær yuu, of wattle bark sheet dou-
bled over, sewed, and glued together, with cord handles, were common.
Water vessels, called torrong, were ‘made of a sheet of bark stripped from
the bend of a gum tree, about four or five feet [121.9 or 152.4 cm] long,
one foot [30.4 cm] deep, and one [foot] wide, in the shape of a canoe’.
Other bags were constructed from wattle, warngar [Messmate], or
stringybark lined inners and covered in animal skin, other barks, or bas-
ket weaves. Knives were formed from reeds or kawee leaves: ‘a reed about
a foot [30.4 cm] or a foot and a half [45.7 cm] in length, split in half
lengthwise … The sharp edge of the reed is the saw with which they cut
their meat … It was … about ¼ of an inch [1.0 cm] in diameter’. Wattle
and eucalyptus gums were prized as adhesives; poorteetch and kærk fibres
were used as cords or strings; palatt wood was ideal for spear throwers;
and the timber of kuuluurt [Drooping Sheoak] and paperbarks were used
for boomerangs, fire sticks, spears, implements, and digging sticks.
‘Fire-stick farming’ on waark was a common practice. The ‘smoke
[that] arose from many parts of the lower country, and shewed that the
inhabitants were very generally scattered over its surface’ was not simply
campfires but an act of firing the landscape. In a vegetation community
that was dependent upon fire for the stimulation of regenerative pro-
cesses, the Aboriginals performed an enigmatic role as an ecological agent.
Often, in the act of harvesting muurang, they burnt the grass ‘the better
to see these roots’. Firing of long marsh grasses in the late dry season was
also a mode of attracting and entrapping birds. Firing also promoted
young fresh grass shoots which were the preferred food of browsing kan-
garoos and emus:
The face of the whole country [north of Tappoc] had been burnt and the rushes
of the swamp and the young grass anchistiria [T. triandra], had attained to a
growth of 7 or 8 inches [17.7 or 20.3 cm] and a most verdant appearance.
* * *
108 D. S. Jones
The scope of these Aboriginal relationships with plants and the landscape
must also be considered in the context that Aboriginals have been major
instruments of environmental change. Repeated firing, natural ‘garden-
ing’, and camp site defaecation processes ‘cleaned’ the landscape, created
fresh regrowth, increased vegetation mosaic diversity, manipulated suc-
cessional processes and the stability of Allocasuarina sp. woodlands,
increased soil salinity, and concentrated sites of soil fertility.
These impacts appear particularly pronounced in the past 10,000 years
of District landscape occupancy supporting the hypothesis that the land
had undergone alterations by means of Aboriginal actions. Conventional
thought now acknowledges that Aboriginal firing did impact the land-
scape by promoting grassland spread and the loss of woodlands. Firing
created open accessible ground and reduced nesting opportunities for
birds and mammals. Apart from stimulating fresh grass shoots fire was
also necessary for promoting germination, fruiting, or tuber formation.
Over time, regular firing caused incremental declines in soil mineral fer-
tility and organic matter depth. There now appears to be a greater set of
cultural alterations, apart from impacts upon fauna that may have been
consciously precipitated by Aboriginals.
Firing of the District’s landscape certainly ‘cleaned’ up undergrowth
and litter, but it appears also to have manipulated the mosaic to perpetu-
ate the grassland structure and its strong antagonism to trees. Firing also
promoted new shoots, plant seeding, and the nurturing of tuberous sta-
ple food plants. Conscious thinning of the latter, in ‘natural gardening’
processes, ensured manipulation and proactive stimulation of food and
fibrous plant supplies. Regular seasonal occupation of favoured campsites
resulted in the accumulation of food, shells, other refuse, and defaecated
plants seeds and nutrient-rich excreta creating favourable soil composi-
tions conducive to the growth of food plants, edible tubers, and fruit
trees and shrubs. The long-term ramification of this pattern is an increase
in the distribution and frequency of favoured edible plant ‘gardens’ and
the promotion of ideal micro-environments by digging and soil aerating
acts. The collective acts of firing and ‘gardening’ conceivably resulted in a
dysclimax of a woodland mosaic thereby fostering the present grassland
landscape.
Firing practice equally appears to have impacted the already nutrient

deficient soil structures. Repeated firing converted nutrients into soluble
forms, which were promptly leached away by the next rains. By limiting
upper-storey growth, firing also impacted the rain shadow of this micro-
environment by lessening its frequency thereby affecting stream flows,
puunyart [eel] migration regimes, water-based and dependent species and
their habitats, and increasing insolation effects upon both plant and soil.
The result may be a much drier landscape in 1800 than in 10,000–4000
BP thereby instigating the deliberate construction of puunyart harvesting
devices. In support of this argument the regional climatic profile, from
paleoecological research, suggests that the plains landscape became more
drier around 3000 BP, but that rainshadows in the Tæ rak [Lake Condah]
and Gariwerd [Grampians] areas resulted in the maintenance of similar
or more reliable rainfall levels. Tentative research conclusions, for exam-
ple, from Tæ rak suggest the operational age of yere.roc [weirs] at 8000 BP,
but that they were only associated with continuous occupation in the last
1000–2000 BP. This occupation may have been stimulated by regional
drying on the plains and increased pressure on food resources because of
a shrinkage elsewhere or Aboriginal population increases due to more
reliable food sources.
Emergence from the glacial period, some 13,000 BP, also witnessed a
progressive and widespread increase in Allocasuarina sp. woodlands, as
recorded in fossil pollen preserved in lake sediments. Allocasuarina preva-
lence in the District lapsed in favour of, not fire-tolerant eucalypts, but
salt-tolerant chenopeds as the plains entered a particularly warm climatic
phase. This vegetation change appears due to both the dryer climate and
rising water tables that brought salt to the surface as little charcoal evi-
dence suggests Allocasuarina impact and decline from fires. Certainly,
changes in firing patterns would have promoted increased saltbush pol-
len, as occurred around 1840 with European land clearance activities, but
it appears more logical to attribute vegetation changes around 10,000 BP
to the shifting Aboriginal reliance upon fire to foster greater food resources
and the cumulative incremental shifts in soil structure and microclimate.
In doing so, the vegetation mosaic progressively shifted from Allocasuarina
sp.-dominated woodlands to a perennial grassland mosaic.
110 D. S. Jones
Human intervention, promulgated by climatic changes, appears to

have established the 1800 vegetation mosaic. The regime of Aboriginal
‘gardening’ and firing processes simply maintained an artificial landscape
structure that was disrupted in and around 1840 with European
occupation.
* * *
Many plant species were used for Aboriginal dietary sustenance, artefact
production, and for medicines. Central in daily activities was muurang.
The muurang which somewhat resembles a small parsnip, with a flower like a
buttercup, grows chiefly on the open plains. It is much esteemed on account of
its sweetness … The roots are washed and put into a rush basket made on pur-
pose, and placed in the oven in the evening to be ready for next morning's
breakfast … The muurang root, when cooked, is called yuwatch. It is often
eaten uncooked.
The radish-like tuber of muurang, or ‘yam-daisy’, was a key staple food

over most of the year: ‘it is white, and shaped like a carrot, but the taste
is more like a turnip’. A perennial herb, it was dormant over the late dry
season, produced a rosette of leaves with mid-dry season rains, bloomed
in the early dry season with yellow dandelion-like flowers, and carried a
tuberous non-starchy root that withered and was replaced in the good
wet season.
There were numerous supplemental food plants apart from muurang.
The granular potato-tasting starchy rhizomes of poorteetch were steam-
cooked in ovens before the outer skin was peeled back to reveal the cen-
tral edible stalk. Starchy-sweet tubers of piik kuuruuk were prepared in a
similar manner. The spherical starchy corms of Marsh Club-rushes were
roasted and then pounded into thin cakes. The crisp white non-starchy
tubers of Pale Vanilla Lilies, the swollen roots of parm, the numerous
tapering, tuberous, starchy roots of popoto or non-starchy tubers of Grass
lilies, Chocolate Lilies, the water white tubers of Fringe-lilies, the dense
starchy corms of Early Nancy, and the starchy root tubers of Purple
Donkey-orchids, puewan, and Greenhood Orchids were all popular
foods. Cooked or steamed in baskets before eating, they were generally
available throughout the year. The starchy roots of taaruuk and tarook
were ‘cooked in baskets, and kneaded on a small sheet of bark into dough’.
The latter was an alternate staple food in the good wet season to muurang.
The radish-like, highly starchy tuberous roots of kullum kulkeetch [Native
Geranium] were also pounded after cooking to reduce its tannin flavour.
There is, however, little ethnographic mention of seeds being collected
and ground, such as the Nardoo of the interior, to supplement this heavy
tuberous root diet.
Other foods included the bland boee wan [Native Bread], the starchy
tap root of gnuritch [Austral Hollyhock] that was baked and beaten before
eating; the mucilaginous starchy rhizomes of muulaa [Austral Bracken]
which were ‘roasted in hot ashes, beaten into a paste’; the sticky and sweet
fruits of Mistletoes which were eaten raw; and the Summer ripened fruits
of Inland Pigface which were eaten raw, or its salty succulent leaves which
were eaten with meat as a salad. Juicy ripened fruits of palatt were picked
and eaten in the good wet and early dry seasons, as were the red berries of
the barring-gootch [Native Raspberry], creamy poloitch [White Elderberry]
berries, and early ripened fruits of mookitch.
Kawee, when stripped, also provided a food source:
It was a portion of the grass-tree top. This was first pulled out of the stem … and
then a length of soft, white, succulent matter neatly twisted off the lower
extremity, where it had been embedded in the rugged trunk; it reminded me of
asparagus in the proportion of tender to tough.
Other foods included juicy young leaves and stems of tallark [Sow
Thistle], nectar gums of warrarakk and karrank which when diluted in
water were favoured drinks, and the nectar of flowering wuurak cones
that flavoured water supplies. The highly prized lerp (larp, or buumbuul),
from small-sap suckling insects containing sugar and formed on wuurott
leaves was eaten directly or mixed with water as a drink. At ‘Trawalla’, the
‘Manna falls very abundantly from the gum trees at certain seasons of the
year. I think it was in March I gathered some. It is very good, and tastes
like almond biscuits’. Mushrooms, varieties of fungi, and yellow Marsh
Cress were also eaten, and possums stuffed with herbs and cooked were a
favoured dish.
112 D. S. Jones
Campsite enrichment practices reinforced the patterns created by fire.

Campsites experienced regular gentle firing, in contrast to larger fires,
permitting nutrient accumulation. The defecation of hard seeded berries
and fruits around campsites casually replanted selected sweet or nutri-
tious species. The defecation and seeding process over time produced
improved strains of food-based plants similar to European cultivated
varieties of fruit.
Plants also provided medicinal aids and remedies. Tallark when eaten
raw, soothed pain and induced sleep. Kullum kulkeetch was an aid for
diarrhoea treatment, and vapours from roasted strips of muutchung bark
infused cured rheumatic joints. Wuurott gum ‘stuffed into the hollow of
the tooth’ soothed toothaches, or a cape ‘made of the basket rush
[poorteetch] was worn over the shoulders and round the neck’ called wee-
armeetch. For ‘indigestion, the small roots of the narrow-leafed gum tree,
or the bark of the Acacia, are infused in hot water, and the liquor drunk
as a tonic’. Common Sneezeweed was used as a tonic for chest complaints
or applied as a lotion for skin. Burning and smoking fumes of peeal and
wuurott leaves were aids for fevers. The potent minty scents of poang
guurk [River Mint] were used for colds and chest complaints, and gnuritch
sap was applied to relieve boils. The sap of palatt was also considered an
ointment remedy for snakebite.
4.6 White Cockatoo Twilight

During the summer season … the snakes are active, and bask in broad day in
any ungrassed patch of ground; when the lizards dart to and fro, and the large
iguanas [goannas] slowly ascend their favorite trees for shelter or food; when the
native bear [koala] goes to sleep at mid-day in the open forest, or dozes stupidly
on the branch of a tree; when the air is filled with the hum and whirr of innu-
merable insects; …
Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria: …, 1876
* * *
Animals were an integral facet of Aboriginal culture on waark [open

plains]. They provided sustenance, constituted representations of mytho-
logical ancestors, and were featured in totems and deities. Totemism
implied kinship to particular animal species, often by hereditary descen-
dancy, and created an extension of the mythological anchorages extant on
waark. To the Djab wurrung, the matrilineal moiety divisions of Grugidj
(white cockatoo) and Gamadj (black cockatoo) formed the primary
totems of their clans, and these were divided again into sub-totems often
with geographical relationships to landscape features that held mytho-
totemic significance.
Religious responsibilities … [ensured] the perpetuation of species associated

with the particular mythic beings linked with that territory.
Mythological significance and potency determined practices of animal

hunting subsistence and established a uniquely manipulated animal bio-
system. An understanding of these mythological roles and meanings—
which acted as bridges between the Dreaming and the present by their
presence in the landscape—is important in comprehending Aboriginal
relationships to animals.
Seasonal subsistence patterns also determined dietary patterns. Animal
fecundity in certain seasons, such as during breeding seasons, migration
times, or over parched dry seasons, directed Aboriginal subsistence behav-
iour but also influenced attitudes and decisions regarding both daily
activities and unexpected occurrences. Abundance of game permitted
semi-permanency in intricate spatial organisation and occupancy hierar-
chies linked to ecological distributions, resulting in a ‘complex hunter-
gatherer’, not nomadic, way of life.
This section first explores the role of animals in the landscape. In par-
ticular, their controlling force in mythological stories and subsistence
strategies on waark. It then considers the environmental manipulation
and earthworks undertaken for swamp management and to increase
aquatic resource re-production and harvesting. The objective was to cre-
ate micro-climates comfortable for animal occupation and reproduction.
* * *
114 D. S. Jones

Like actors out of nonsensical children’s stories, mythic characters held

animal forms but their spiritual qualities remained human. Their depic-
tion in different physical shapes, like thinking and behaving human enti-
ties, implied moral principles that often explained clan rules, food
fecundity or absence, and foretold or explained phenomena in experien-
tial and human landscapes—the two domains. Mythic characters also
transmuted into forms and shapes in the landscape enabling linkages to
ancestors, their stories and journeys, providing strong lessons to better
guide the frailties of humanity.
The very presence of Bunjil, a ‘gigantic man, living above the clouds’,
the benefactor of Aboriginal existence on waark is reinforced by the sym-
bol of the Eaglehawk. Representing a very powerful one, a resident of the
clouds, a being who brought the rains to nurture grasses and roots, and
who encouraged animals to fecundate for the Aboriginal’s benefit,
bespoke the symbol of the watchful hunter over waark. Bunjil (Eaglehawk)
and Waa (the Crow) were the patrilineal moieties to the Wadawurrung
clans in the Kulin languages, whereas Gamadj (Kaputch) or Gabadj
(Kappatch) [black cockatoo], and Grugidj (Krokitch) or Guragidj [white
cockatoo] moieties for the Jardwadjali, Djab wurrung, Gulidjan, Djargurd
wurrung, and Dhauwurd wurrung clans occupied similar representational
positions.
Bunjil, apart from his immediate family, also had six other ‘Young
Men’ who travelled in pairs looking after the people and carrying out his
orders. These six were: Jurt-jurt, the Nankeen Kestrel and Thara, the
Swamp [‘Quail’] Hawk; Yukope, the Green Parroquet [‘Parakeet’], and
Dantun, the Blue Mountain Parrot; and Tadjeri, the Brush-tailed
Phascogale [‘Brush-tail Possum’], and Turnung, the Flying Mouse [‘Glider
Possum] who both inhabited the trees; all were powerful wizards. These
six were also linked to stars: Alpha Centauri A and B, Alpha Crucis and
Crucis, and Achernar, respectively, accentuated their presence in the dark
landscape above.
Animals also feature in images or stories about ‘Bunjil’s Cave’, ‘The
Cave of the Serpents’, and Bunyips. They acquired symbolism as intel-
lectual vehicles for explaining phenomena, rituals, and superstitions or
116 D. S. Jones
establishing tangible kinships to Dreaming beings. They also occurred as

metaphors in stories about the observance of hunting and gathering prac-
tices. Myths retold in this section are illustrative of the prominence of
animals in stories or in oral literatures.
As an example, in the myth about Murkupang, which explains the
extant forms of Booruc [Mt Shadwell] and Mondilibi [Flat-top Hill], the
concluding passage tells of his escape from near suffocation by his trans-
formation into mumgaty [mopoke]. His eight dingoes, also nearly suffo-
cated, transformed into the ‘soldier bird, miner, magpie, black jay, crow,
white cockatoo, eaglehawk and quail hawk [Swamp Hawk]’ to escape the
flames. Murkupang remains today a resident and hunter of the darkness
and cries mournfully of his past misdeeds that warranted his transmuta-
tion. His dingoes, with watchful, noisy, swift, and voracious personali-
ties, are now represented by the birds that circle in the skies.
Undoubtedly, there are many more myths based upon animal charac-
ters that hold moral lessons or explanations on phenomena. Each is easily
grasped and easily identifiable. Each is also linked to a place, or a series of
places, providing tangible anchorages to the landscape, reinforcing a
land–animal–myth triangle of phantasmagoric yet symbolic proportions.
There were, also, other specific superstitions, phenomena, explanations,
or warnings and meanings attached to some animals that are raised in
discussions upon subsistence strategies for aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic
fauna in this section.
It is important also to comprehend the seasonal patterns of Aboriginal
relationships to animals. In this strategy, animals fulfilled both dietary
needs and provided kinship linkages to mythological ancestors. The hunt
accorded with ritual and need; game was not ‘owned’ or obtained for
reasons of storage because these animals were the watching eyes of
Dreaming ancestors.
* * *
Aboriginal responsibilities to animals, as well as plant foods, display a

remarkable practice of sensitive hunting, gathering, and fishing econo-
mies. This often involved direct management and manipulation of plants,
animals, and mo’om [fish] through methods such as burnings, strategic

hunting, and alteration of water drainage patterns. The great diversity
and number of food types enabled semi-permanent occupation of this
landscape, with large base camps at times of inter-band and inter-clan
hunting, gathering, fishing, ceremonial, and exchange activities.
Frequency of habitation and choice of foods were determined by seasonal
patterns, and animal signals and life cycles, including the breeding and
migration of plants, animals, and fish. Particular food resources were
bountiful at and were located in particular ecosystems, during certain
times of the year, and this influenced dietary choices, periodic locations
of campsites, and the timing of ceremonial activities. Savannah wood-
lands were the most favourable land unit for non-seasonal staple foods.
During the late dry season, animal food resources were prolific and in
great diversity. It was a period when savannah grasslands and woodlands
were popular for habitation, and when large-scale kuuræ [kangaroo] and
kowwirr [emu] hunts on waark grasslands were undertaken. Tuukuurwill
[turtles], shellfish, yapeetch [yabbies], and mo’om were also prolific in
perennial streams and lakes. In the woodlands, the abundance of yowwirr
[birds], possums, wallabies, kuurnwill [snakes], kuuræ, muurndarnk [liz-
ards], kowwirr, and other small- and medium-sized mammals added to
the range of food resources. Aboriginals met for great meetings, inter-
clan activities, were widely dispersed across waark and woodlands know-
ing that food resources were plentiful in both these habitats. Wirngbuul
[koala] births also announced this season.
The mid-dry season was the leanest time for the supply of animal and
plant foods. Puunyart [eel], however, were particularly abundant due to
their annual migration down the rivers and watercourses to the sea to
breed. Aboriginal populations concentrated their daily activities around
the aquatic-based food resources of puunyart, mo’om, and fibrous root
plants, making necessary encampments along rivers and streams, and
around lakes and swamps. It was a time when wirngbuul and meean
[wombat] young were born, dingoes were breeding, and freshwater yar-
ram [crayfish] and yapeetch were caught. Inter-clan gatherings at Boloke
[Lake Bolac], Tæ rak [Lake Condah], and Cro.cup.per ije below Duwil
[Mt William] shared mo’om and puunyart catches and maintained mo’om
traps and yere.roc [weirs].
118 D. S. Jones
The good wet season was a lean period for animal foods but plant foods
were more abundant. Aboriginals moved away from sodden soils to camp
on drier ground with cover. In the grasslands and woodlands, snared yow-
wir and speared mammals (kuuræ, wallabies, kowwirr) supplemented
Aboriginal reliance upon mo’om; staple plant foods were common in diets.
Freshwater Herrings migrated downstream, and tuukuurwill and Murray
Cod migrated upstream, in flooding waters; it was a time when kowwirr
laid their eggs, dingos gave birth, when pun’ya [Ring-tailed Possums] bred,
when yuurkuurn [Blue-tongue] and Shingle-back Lizards and yuluwill
[Echidna] hibernated, and when kuurang and wuin wuin [Tiger and
Brown Snakes] were low in activity. But mo’om were biting at Tæ rak.
The early dry season was a bountiful time in the grasslands and wood-
lands. Aboriginals camped around swamps, lakes, and creeks, but regularly
moved these camps depending upon available plant and animal foods, and
ground dryness. Yowwirr, bird eggs, shellfish, yapeetch, mo’om, yarram, rats,
kuurnwill, muurndarnk, puunyart, and large and small mammals were
bountiful, supplementing the staple plant, the muurang [Murnong]. It was
a time when the kuyang dakk [Lamprey Eels] and juvenile puunyart
migrated upstream, and when kowwirr eggs were poached.
These four ‘seasons’ provide a demographic subsistence model. These
were, however, not definable periods to Aboriginals. Rather, climatic
changes and signals and announcements by arrivals, departures, births,
and hibernations of animals and plants were their environmental ‘calen-
dar’. A layer of cultural rules and principles also regulated who, when,
and how many of those species an Aboriginal could hunt and kill, and
their permissible uses for clothing, medicines, diets, and in nomencla-
ture. A constant companion to Aboriginals were dingoes who acted as
domesticated hunting dogs, as noted in the myths. They were, however,
not as nomadically wild as contemporary images portray.
* * *
Mammals provided an important diet due to their abundance and cooked

flesh flavours although plant foods were still more often the staples.
Favoured species included wirngbuul, Dingoes, yuluwill, pun’ya and willæ
[Brushtail Possums], tuans, bo’o [Brown Bandicoots], Long-nosed and
wateun [Eastern Barred Bandicoots], work and porormuum [Tiger and

Eastern Quolls], mirwil [Platypus], pirppæær [Water Rats], meeam, kuuræ,
Dunnarts, and yaakaar [Bilby?].
In summer, great hunting drives and inter-clan meetings were regu-
larly held at Mirræwuæ [Black Swamp] near Cor.ramut [Caramut]. A
grand battue was by invitation:
As each tribe left its own country, it spread out in line, and all united to
form a circle of fifteen or twenty miles [24 or 32 km] in diameter. By this
means the kangaroos and emus were enclosed, in order to be driven to an
appointed place … At a fixed time the circle was perfected by arranging the
men so that they stood about two hundred yards [182 m] apart. The circle
then began to contract. As they drew near to the central camp both young
and old [men and women] joined them, and formed a line too compact to
allow escape of the game; which, frightened and confused with the yells
and shouting all around, were easily killed with clubs and spears.
Apart from these drives, animals were chased, often with dingoes,
trapped, speared, or retrieved from their trees or ground burrows. The
dingo was an active and skilful hunter of kuuræ, seldom getting hurt, and
always out-running their prey. Kuuræ were also stalked in the grasslands
by Aboriginals with a ‘circular shield of leafy branches’, remaining
motionless if the kuuræ looked about, until within spear throwing
distance.
Large and small animals were cooked in stone lined and covered ovens.
Meean, kowwirr, and kuuræ often were skinned and cut into pieces to fit
in oven holes. Possums were skinned, or the fur plucked, and cooked in
hot embers often with the entrails removed and the cavity stuffed with
herbs. Kuuræ tails were singed to remove the hair, preventing meat juices
from escaping, and then toasted. Kuurnwill and muurndarnk, considered
good foods, were also toasted in hot embers.
Possum and kuuræ skins were highly prized for clothing, blankets, and
rugs. Pun’ya and willæ were often used by women as clothing—‘in
puris’—and as blankets. Furs also served as decorative pieces and clothing
in corroborees and ceremonies. No use was deemed for meean or wirng-
buul fur, or the skins of muurndarnk or kuurnwill, but mirwil skins were
cured in hot embers.
120 D. S. Jones
Terrestrial animals also held other medicinal purposes and symbolic

rites. A ritual called ‘Wuurong’ involved hot embers being placed in fresh
kuuræ tracks, tiring their legs and rendering them easier to spear. Young
kuuræ were the prerogative of elderly Aboriginals, and young men broke
out in boils if they ate the joeys. Agitated dingoes asleep were a sign that
they were dreaming of kuuræ hunting and that one would be caught the
next day. Yuluwill close to a camp signalled the imminent death of some-
one in the camp. Women, until grey and old, were not permitted to eat
quolls, or they would break out in sores, but wateun were their sole pre-
rogative and men would break out in sores if they ate them. Boys were
not permitted to eat female quadrupeds as they made them peevish and
discontented, but bats were the prerogative of male Aboriginals who had
to protect them from injury. An Aboriginal bitten by an unseen kuurn-
will looked to the sun to see whether the spectre of a kowwirr was repre-
sented; no kowwirr meant hope of recovery, but a kowwirr spectre meant
death. Kuurnwill were not eaten if they had bitten themselves in the belief
that the poison could still be transferred. Possum oil fat mixed with red
ochre would protect bodies from the cold, sick persons were commonly
wrapped in possum skins, and a cure for rheumatism involved the ban-
daging of the affected part with tuan or pun’ya cord once bathed.
In the dark landscape, Barrukill [Hydra] was the ancestor hunter of
potchuuk [Kangaroo Rats]. To his right were Karlok [his dog] and
potchuuk being chased.
Yowwir and aquatic foods, witchetty grubs, ants, moths, and so on also
supplemented diets. Moth pupae, at the base of gum trees, were dug up
and baked in hot members. Muutchanger and puuron [Witchetty grubs]
were cut out live from dead muutchung [Blackwood] and eucalypt timber,
and are eaten alive … with as much pleasure as a white man eats a living
oyster … Roasted in embers, they are delicate and nutty in flavour, varying in
quality according to the kind of tree into which they bore, and on which they
feed. Those found in the trunks of the common wattle [muutchung] are con-
sidered the finest and sweetest.
Some invertebrates, excluding molluscs, held medicinal purposes or

foreshadowed phenomena. Troublesome muurukar [mosquitoes] and
tarrondal [crickets] foretold of rain, and noisy kalgall [cicadas] singing at

night presaged hot winds the next day. Wupkueaa pueetmuuk [spiders]
were the prerogative of male Aboriginals and no one dare kill one. The fat
of the witchetty grubs was used as an ointment for small children.
Challeep mun’girr [yellow leeches] mixed with roasted kuuræ liver and tal-
lark [sow thistles] into a medicine called kallup kallup induced vomiting
in greedy children. The luminescence of lanjerr [glow-worms] was
believed to have come from Butt kuee tuukuung [Antares] in the dark
landscape.
Aquatic animals, especially puunyart, were a rich and supplementary
food resource. Puunyart, in particular, were one of the most nutritious
and prized of mo’om. Seasonal migration and breeding cycles normally
dictated hunting times. Apart from puunyart, yapeetch, kuyang dakk,
Freshwater Herrings, Graylings, chuulim [Blackfish], tarropatt [Dwarf ]
and Common Galaxias, frogs, tuukuurwill, challuup [freshwater mus-
sels], and paapee challuup [water beetles] were common aquatic-based
food resources.
The mid-dry season heralded puunyart migration season to the sea,
and a time of great Aboriginal fishing meetings. Puunyart larvae, as lep-
tocephalae, spawned in tropical waters, and travelled in currents to reach
Victorian rivers in the early dry season. Where not obstructed by water-
falls, large rapids, or dams, they colonised inland lakes, swamps, and
streams to grow from elvers to puunyart over several years on a varied
carnivorous diet. Muddy lake shores, alkaline lakes, slow-flowing rivers,
and lagoons were their favoured habitats supporting large colonies. In the
early dry season, mature puunyart metamorphose to adapt to the fresh to
salt water changes, and migrate in higher water flows to the sea, to return
to breeding areas. Eeling was a male Aboriginal role, but both males and
females were involved in yere.roc construction. Fishery trenches, called
vams, were constructed from stones, sods, and branches and arrabines
[nets] were placed in yere.roc gaps. Below Duwil, ‘we found many low sod
banks extending across the shallow branches of the river, with apertures
at intervals, in which were placed long, narrow, circular nets (like a large
stocking) made of rush work’.
Popular eeling locations were at Boloke and on Salt Creek from
Tuureen tuureen to the Hopkins. There were also elaborate fisheries and
122 D. S. Jones
favoured eeling spots at Tæ rak, Homerton, Tung’ung bunnart [Hopkins

Falls], and Cro.cup.per ije below Duwil. The extensiveness and technology
applied to these fisheries suggest that they were more than simply puuny-
art harvesting devices, but operated as swamp management retention
devices. By water regulation, one could control puunyart populations and
favourably improve breeding conditions, like in ‘eel farms’.
Other aquatic species were also caught. ‘In addition to eels, muscle
[sic] and tortoise are also obtained’ at Boloke. Favourites, such as mo’om,
‘muscles [sic]’, ‘crawfish’, and crustaceans were caught in many rivers and
lakes, but ‘perch cod’ [Murray Cod] was then an uncommon species in
the streams. Mo’om were caught by baiting cords of prickly acacia, like fly
casting rods, or in baskets like arrabines or neer-rig-ger [dredges] acting as
drag-nets. Hooks appear not to have been used in fishing. Tarropatt
[Dwarf Galaxias], ‘delicious little fish like white bait’, were caught in
baskets placed in walls of stone that dammed May.jow.renoke, a rivulet
that entered Kuurnkolak [Lake Colongulac], and in Parl.ring.yalloke
[Pirron Yalloak Creek] as it entered Coraing [Lake Corangamite], and
were cooked quickly in hot embers. Kuyang dakk, a migratory mo’om, was
also caught near river mouths. The Tæ rak fisheries, apart from puunyart,
supported Graylings, Australian Smelt, chuulim, Galaxias, Gudgeon, and
Hardyheads.
Paapee challup, the ‘mother of mussels’, swarming on the rivers’ surface
was a sign that ‘plenty of mussels there’. Tuukuurwill were common in
the Hopkins River, nesting and covering their eggs in the sandy shores.
Aboriginals believed that thunder caused them to breed and lay their
eggs. Their favoured eggs, indicated by small mounds, were dug up and
then roasted in hot embers. At ‘Trawalla’, challuup were also retrieved by
women diving into the freshwater pools.
Yowwir provided another food source. They were either snared or
speared, depending upon their size, and often nests were raided for their
prized eggs. Favoured species hunted included kowwirr, laahwin
[Australian Bustards], eagles and goshawks, kuutchon [Brolgas], herons
and egrets, kuunawarr [Black Swans], kurral [Cape Barren Geese], ducks,
cormorants, ibis and spoonbills, lapwings, crows and ravens, quails, puu-
lokor [Painted Snipe], and numerous sea fowl. Putchang al [Australian
Pelicans], and their eggs, were ‘considered too fishy to eat’.
In the late dry season, inter-clan hunts were organised. A favoured

place was ‘Mirræwuæ, a large marsh celebrated for emus and other kinds
of game’, and the hunting tactics employed were the same as those used
at Cor.ramut for kuuræ. Stalking, snaring with nooses, and spearing were
common hunting methods. Disguised by shields of plant foliage, ‘with a
noose fastened on the end of a long slender stick’, yowwir were mes-
merised by the baits and caught in the loops. Favoured snaring spots were
on the Merri near ‘Injemira’, and at waterpools, such as on the
Arrandoovong or in the Dundas Ranges. Kurral, parrots, and quail were
also easy prey on waark, including spots at ‘Ondit’, ‘Kolor’ [‘Mt Rouse’],
‘Burnbank’, and ‘Eumeralla’.
Laahwin could be killed by stalking it with spear or waddy, often by
taking advantage of its habit of deliberately concealing itself amongst
long grasses. During breeding seasons, both mother and eggs were prized.
Kowwirr were run down by dingoes or enticed into boggy swamp waters
to trap them. ‘Emu is considered the greatest delicacy’, and its feathers,
fat, flesh, and eggs were all prized for ornamental, medicinal, and suste-
nance purposes. Kuunawarr could easily be killed by a hunter with a
waddy wading within tall reeds and sedges of swamps. In the late dry
season, long grasses were also set alight to attract and suffocate yowwir,
even crows, making them easy prey. Waterholes could be enclosed by
brush fences with a bower near the opening, in which the hunter noosed
passing yowwir, especially pigeons, as they came to drink during the day
and, particularly, at sunset. Quail were hunted during their breeding sea-
son. Enticed by imitated calls of their mates, hunters with shield, wand,
and noose, easily caught them in the long grasses. Eagle eggs were readily
retrieved from nests, but the nest was set alight if young had been hatched
causing them to jump out.
Birds were cooked in ovens or hot embers with or without feathers.
Kowwirr, kuunawarr, and laahwin were often skinned and cut into pieces
to fit within ovens, and their feathers were retained for other purposes.
Near Bainenong [near Lake Buloke], one squatter was amused with the
approach to roasting a kowwirr:
Having first roughly plucked it, they took off the skin, which they stuffed with
tender gum twigs; thus prepared, it was delicately roasted at a slow fire, and
124 D. S. Jones
then rich, yellow, oily lengths of what looked like the thickest of the fattest pos-
sible goose-skin were trimmed off and swallowed, as the Lazaroni of Naples are
said to suck down macaroni.
Parrots and cockatoos at ‘Trawalla’ were normally cooked in ‘some hot

ashes’. Most eggs, including kowwirr, were cooked in hot embers, but
some, such as kuunawarr, were eaten raw. Kowwirr and kuunawarr feath-
ers were prized for decorations in corroborees and at ceremonies.
Yowwir also served medicinal purposes or presaged phenomena. Flocks
of crying chinupp [White] and wirann [Banksian], cockatoos passing
overhead foretold the arrival of friends. The wails of passing kuuriwirp
[Eastern Curlews] presaged a death. Mopokes and Kokok, the yuuitch
pilap [Powerful Owl], represented evil omens and connexions to the
spirit world. On smelling death, the latter frequented neighbourhoods
screeching ‘Kokok-kokok’. The yuuitch pilap also competed with
Aboriginals for possums, tuans, and small animals, so its eggs, laid in
muutchung, were much sought after for retribution and food. The fat of
the owl rubbed on running sores dried them up quickly. The cry of chirmp
chirmp [Magpie-lark] warned of bad weather, and if it was killed or eaten
by a child, the child’s hair would go grey prematurely. Whistles of noisy
muunyukill [Black Jays], and the arrival of the migratory Fork-tailed
Swifts, also foretold of bad weather and rains. Kuutchon eggs and young,
and the tails of kowwirr and laahwin were the foods of elderly male
Aboriginals. Women were not allowed to eat their flesh or eggs until grey
haired or they would break out in sores; young men, similarly, would
turn grey haired and break out in sores. A baby would not be taken near
a dead kuutchon because it would also break out in sores. The oily fat of
kowwirr mixed with red ochres was the best ointment to protect bodies
from the cold, although the fat of other waterfowl could be substituted.
The cherrup cherrup [Black Fan-tailed Flycatcher] and wirram guæ [Sacred
White Ibis] were friends who warned of the presence of kuurnwill, so
were never killed. Pacific Black Ducks were reserved for elderly males,
and if eaten by a young man, he would die in the next battle. The young
of kuutchon, laahwin, and Pacific Black Ducks were deemed forbidden
food, although their eggs were easy prey for all. Eagles, playing in sweep-
ing vertical loop movements, warrowean, foretold of warm weather.
The time for kowwirr egg laying was marked by the arrival of Waa
[Canopus; Carina] on the horizon. The first egg was called purtæ wuu-
chuup. Waa represented the Crow in the myth of Gneeanggar (Wedge-
tailed Eagle) [Sirius; Canis Major]. Gneeanggar’s attendants, still
searching, were the Pleaides to the Pirt kopan noot of Djab wurrung.
Kuurokeheear [the Pleaides], however, to the Kuurn kopan noot of
Dhauwurd wurrung were a flock of Grugidj. Gneeanggar’s three sisters,
Kuupartakil [Orion’s Belt], also followed. Fomalhaut [Piscis Austrinus]
represented Bunjil, and Tuulirmp [Centauri] was chirmp chirmp. Kuurn
kuuronn and Gnæang kuuronn [Large and Small Magellanic Clouds] were
male and female kuutchon, respectively. The upper twilight at sunset was
kuurokeheear [white cockatoo twilight] and the under arch was kappi-
heear puuron [black cockatoo twilight].
* * *
Puunyart and mo’om were a rich and nutritious supplement to Aboriginal

diets. Generations of technological information had resulted, by 1800, in
the construction of numerous small or extensive yere.roc and rock fishery
systems that increased water impoundment, thereby improving puunyart
and mo’om reproduction environments, and increasing the volume of
puunyart and mo’om migration. Increased numbers of puunyart guaran-
teed food resources, especially during the good wet and mid dry seasons
when animal foods were lean.
It was, however, the technical knowledge evinced in their construction
that was more fascinating. Advanced thinking in surveying, hydrological
flows, and engineering resulted in structures that reduced flood risks,
increased the longevity of water retention in waterholes, and improved
mo’om and puunyart breeding opportunities. A Van Diemen’s Land
Aboriginal could only remark on seeing these structures: ‘Tar le winem
parer wirngarnly tarnadudd—Oh dear, look at that. Black fellow never
tired’. Yet, the simplicity of the construction materials—scoria rubble,
sapling platforms, plaited arrabines of reed fibres—and their use in rock
channelling, observation perches, and yere.roc to catch puunyart and
mo’om in deliberately positioned gaps in scoria walls, displayed a marked
comprehension of subtle physical resource use. On crossing the Hopkins
near ‘Merrang’:
126 D. S. Jones
Here I observed a large weir at least 100 yards [91.4 m] in length and though
the first I had seen, I was assured by its structure and its situation before I
reached it that it was the work of the Aboriginal natives. I called to Pevay …
He said they got plenty eels [from it] and then showed us how they did it by
biting their heads and throwing them on shore. This weir was made of stout
sticks from 2–3 inches [5–8 cm] thick drove in to the ground and vertically
fixed, and other sticks interlaced in an horizontal manner. A hole is left in the
centre and a long eel pot made of basket or matting is placed before it and into
it the eels gather and are thus taken. It is probable that 2 or 3 such pots are set
in large weirs. This weir must have been 100 yards long [91.4 m], at least, and
made with wings or corner pieces at the ends thus, or similar to it [sic.].
Similar technology and water management systems appear common-

place throughout waark. Knowledge of construction was clearly shared
amongst the clans, such as along Salt Creek below Tuureen tuureen, where
numerous bands met during the autumn migratory season. ‘Each tribe
has alloted to it a portion of the stream … and the usual stone barrier is
built by each family, with the eel basket in the opening’. Knowledge of
puunyart catching, and the manipulation of watercourses to achieve this
objective, was thereby diffused. This technology was not new in 1800 but
had obviously been extant for numerous generations.
Support for these conclusions lies in the numerous yere.roc that were
observed in the 1830s and 1840s. Some were small, like at Par-woor-deet,
and some were extensive such as Cro.cup.per ije or at Tæ rak. The yere.roc
at Par-woor-deet made advantage of a break of lava and use of ‘wind-
stone’ to construct ‘a weir across the river for catching eels’. On ‘Tarrone’,
on the Moyne,
I measured this weir with a tape, 200 ft [60.96 m]; 5 ft [1.5 m] high. It was
turned back at each end and two or three holes in the middle was left for plac-
ing the eel pots as also one at each end.
These yere.roc or wiers [sic] are built with some attention to the principle of
mechanics. Those erected on a rocky bottom have the sticks indented in a groove
made by removing the small stone so as to form a groove. The wier is kept in a
straightline. The small stones are laid against the bottom of the stick, verging or
forked sticks … These sticks are 3, 4 or 5 inches [7.6–12.7 cm] in diameter
some of the smaller wiers are in the form of a segment of a circle. The convex
side against the current.
Below Murdadjoog [Mt Abrupt] a variation on the yere.roc was observed:

‘several dikes [had been] dug by the natives for draining small lagoons
into the large ones for the purpose of catching eels, etc. These channels
were from a foot to 18 inches [30.48–45.72 cm] deep and from 8 to 300
yards [7.3–274.2 m] in length’. Manipulation of water levels by dikes
demanded knowledge of hydraulics to ensure the best result. These yere.
roc and dikes were minor when compared to the structures at Toolondo,
Tæ rak and Cro.cu.per ije. The latter was located at ‘the confluence of this
creek with the marsh [, and I] observed an immense piece of ground
trenched and banked, resembling the work of civilized man’.
A specimen of art I had not before seen of the same extent and therefore required
some time to inspect it … These trenches are hundreds of yards in length. I
measured at one place in one continuous triple line for the distance of 500 yards
[457 m] … An area of at least 15 acres [6.0 ha] was thus turned over.
The plan or design of these ramifications was extremely perplexing … All its
varied form and curious curvilinear windings and angles of every size and
shape and parallels, etc; at intervals small apertures left where they placed their
arabines or eel pots. These gaps were supported by pieces of the bark of trees and
sticks … Some of the banks were 2 feet [60.9 cm] in height, the most of them
a foot [30.5 cm] and the hollow a foot deep by 10 or 11 inches [25.5 or 28
cm] wide. The main branches were wider.
This complex, called Cro.cup.per ije, consisted of numerous vams for

managing the hydrological flow and to catch puunyart in arrabines. The
‘many low sod banks extending across the shallow branches of the river,
with apertures at intervals, in which were placed long, narrow, circular
nets (like a large stocking) made of rush-work’ at Cro.cup.per ije, were
illustrative of this technology.
One could also control the time of the catch. The tarropatt could be
caught in May.jow.renoke, which flowed into Kuurnkolak, by damming it
with stones and inserting arrabines into the gaps. ‘The women and chil-
dren go up the stream and drive the fish down’. The tarropatt, ‘delicious
128 D. S. Jones
little fish like white-bait’, could also be caught in arrabines at Parl.ring.

yalloke mouth to Coraing. A variation on arrabines was a neer-rig-ger (a
mole or a ‘dredge’) which was observed near Tar.rong [Terang], ‘for catch-
ing small fish. The manufacture same as that employed in making baskets
but the shape like a canoe. It was five feet [152.4 cm] long and 18 inches
[45.7 cm] deep the bottom was sharp and marked from a stick’.
* * *
It is now recognised that Aboriginals played a significant part in the

extinction of a whole fauna—the Pleistocene megafauna—by habitat
alteration. This conclusion is drawn from continental fossil and paleoeco-
logical evidence, but it can also be conjectured that Aboriginal ‘hus-
bandry’ practices in the District promoted certain animal foods in favour
of others which declined in populations. At the same time, vegetation
manipulation and natural ‘gardening’ processes impacted upon animal
food sources and thereby their frequency.
The effects of these actions are numerous. Repeated firing reduced
nesting opportunities and removed understorey cover for mammals and
reptiles. Megafaunal extinction was aided by habitat firing and concen-
trated hunting activities. At the same time puunyart and mo’om fecundity
was promoted, egg collection and feasting activities indirectly controlled
animal and bird numbers, ritual and annual culling of kowwirr and kurræ
herds indirectly controlled their breeding, and established ‘gardening’
practices ensured stable populations of chinupp and similar tuberous-
food dependent birds, and limited sugar-proffering vegetation, fruit trees,
and tuberous plants controlling possum populations. These processes
were disrupted by European intrusion upon the landscape resulting in
irregular animal and bird population variations pointing to artificial pop-
ulation equilibriums and thresholds from Aboriginal activities and cul-
tural rites.
Decline of megafauna is now attributed to the gradual impoverish-
ment of marsupial fauna due to repeated firing or destruction of ecosys-
tems in converse to climatic changes to more arid environments. Rapid
extinction also correlates with major vegetation mosaic changes about
10,000–6000 BP when Allocasuarina sp. decline and salt-tolerant plant
species increase occurred. As a corollary, repeated firing of understorey

and tree litter stimulated tuberous plant foods, and perennial grass suc-
cession and selective plant germination established habitats that limited
shelter opportunities necessary for nesting, birthing and hunting camou-
flage for mammals, reptiles, and birds. In contrast, the construction of
habitats for mo’om and puunyart harvesting artificially increased their
populations. Although dating around 8000 BP, the most intensive period
of harvesting device use occurs in the last 5000–3000 BP, before 1800,
and can be linked to the general drying of the District’s environment.
Aboriginal practices of marsupial hunting and egg feasting also artifi-
cially controlled faunal population levels. While surpluses were culled in
the late dry season, their ritual frequency may also be linked to the
regional climatic drying which placed increased stress upon faunal
resources, particularly puunyart, to sustain existing Aboriginal population
levels. A clear illustration is the dependence of chinupp upon muurang as
a staple food and its occupation catchment that correlates to pre-European
muurang distributions, and associatively to River Red Gum distributions.
Chinupp population levels appear to have been linked to muurang culti-
vation frequency. With European and sheep encroachment, disruption of
cultivation practices and prolific devouring of the species occurred, ensur-
ing the rapid decline of Chinupp populations.
Food scrap decomposition and human defaecation activities also con-
centrated nutrient-rich food resources around seasonally occupied camp-
sites. This ensured a rich ‘garden’ of food plants for both Aboriginals and
animals. This permitted concentrations of both faunal and avifaunal and
plant food resources within close proximity of favoured, and normally
well-watered, camp sites.
4.7 Sacred Voices in the Landscape

All I know of the beliefs of the Mukjarawaint is that Bunjil was the father of
all the people, and that he was good, and did no harm to anyone. I may men-
tion here as in one sense belonging to this part of my subject, that one of the
Mukjarawaint said that at one time there was a figure of Bunjil and his dog
130 D. S. Jones
painted in a small cave behind a large rock in the Black Range near Stawell,
but I have not seen it, nor have I heard of anyone seeing it.
Alfred W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of Southeast Australia, 1904
* * *
There were sacred voices in this landscape. Whether verbal, visual, or

experiential, they were reconstituted in myths and ‘oral literatures’, or
inscribed in anthropological treatises by Western eyes as individual notes,
in a spectrum of voices within this landscape. No myth was told without
some reference to a geographical tract or a feature, providing a local iden-
tification or anchorage to the narration. Each myth and anchorage held
external qualities, like ‘intellectual vehicles’, that could express certain
information and sensations to past, present, and future inhabitants. These
voices were often Dreaming mental constructs of futurity that established
Aboriginal landscape relationships. Certain natural or culturally con-
structed installations celebrated these sacred voices.
It is difficult to sketch the futurity and ritual celebratory images of the
landscape given scant ‘oral literature’. While a number of myths exist,
and potential totemic sites have been hypothesised, the full connectivity
of their meanings and phantasmagorical identities in the landscape have
not been unlocked. They lost their potentiality and omnipresence with
the rapid decline of storytellers and ceremonial gatherings in the colo-
nial wake.
This section sketches some of these pieces of ‘truth’. Included are places
that carry symbolic associations, myths that explain landscape features,
and significant narrative pieces which explain the threads of a different
‘truth’. The emphasis remains upon the latent world of the Dreaming, and
the dialogues it inspired with landscape.
* * *
Central in this dialogue were Aboriginal myths. To Aboriginals, these

myths embodied ‘truths’ about why something was the way it was, why it

132 D. S. Jones
was there, and how it fitted into the temporal nature of landscape. They
reflected familiar in a comprehensible reality and held an eternal quality
by their repetition and aural memorisation in ‘fundamentally unchang-
ing statements, valid for all time’.
Landscape held important props for myths, without which they had
no local validity or identification. Land, particular points, spaces within,
and criss-crossing mythical paths, served as literal expressions of the pur-
pose of land stewardship to Aboriginals. As Dreaming beings journeyed
across the landscape, their ‘camp’ sites, their spiritual presences and
routes, or the places where they ‘made themselves’ or ‘turned themselves’,
established a three-dimensional environment that imbued with social
purpose. Each clump of ‘honeysuckle’, waterhole, or cluster of rocks told
of a particular meaning, or of a set of different meanings, often intercon-
nected with the biological web (prominences on the horizon, or the the-
atre in the landscape above, as examples). Landscape therefore spoke with
sacred voices or ‘ghostly languages’. A potency prompting one squatter to
write: ‘What spirits wake when earth is still?’
It is, then, the land which is really speaking—offering, to those who can under-
stand its language, a explanative discourse about how it came to be as it is now,
which beings were responsible for its becoming like that, and who is or should
be responsible for it now. The physiographic sites and places were like the
Djabter headings of a book, and each one has much to say.
Mythic actors became indelibly interwoven and imprinted upon the

landscape. They established the characters behind the songs of the ‘coun-
try’ and the relationships between human and animal inhabitants. Their
epistemological purposes were explained and their futurity charted.
Aboriginals were placed on beek [earth] to commemorate Altjerringa
characters and achievements; controlled by linear time and spiritual
renewal, they watched and cared for sites, paths, lines, and places of the
Dreaming in anticipation of their return. Landscape became the voices:
myths of past, present, and future, arbiters of drought, bountiful har-
vests, lightning bolts, echoes within mysterious caves, clumps of gum
trees, whirlwinds, or eel-stocked lakes.
Rock paintings, totemic sites, and burial sites were expressional instal-
lations linked to these myths and voices. They facilitated human celebra-
tions to actors and meanings implicit in myths. Another response evolved
from environmental or landscape transformations of mythic ancestors. It
is these two responses that are explored here.
In contrast to recorded myths, there is little known about landscape
installations erected or constructed to celebrate these spiritual ancestors.
Ochre paintings, rock arrangements and stone alignments, were the more
recognisable landscape installations. Over time, they were unconsciously
or deliberately destroyed by the plough, cattle grazing, stone wall masons,
firing, patina of age as their presence, purpose, and meaning were with-
held from colonial invaders. They remain question marks in the land-
scape within unknown technological and cultural functions.
Extant ochre paintings are limited on waark [open plains] if you
exclude the numerous shelters in Gariwerd [The Grampians]. Only
Bunjil’s Cave and The Cave of the Serpents are now known. At Bunjil’s
Cave, a representational Buddha-like spirit image, sitting on his haunches,
accompanied by two dogs (one in white pipe-clay), is portrayed in red
ochre. White pipe-clay has been added later to the figure in a series of
dots, epaulettes, and stripes much like the image of a soldier’s tunic. The
image is a powerful figure in a crypt-like hollow of a granite tor and is
distinctively unlike the highly stylised and symbolic motifs of bars, pig-
ment stencilled hands, and stick figures of ‘lizard men’ that characterise
Gariwerd ‘art’ shelters. The linking trait in the latter is the commonality
of motifs to a number of sites, unlike an image that is a pictorial venera-
tion of a human-like spirit. Bunjil was to the clans of western and central
Victoria an influential good spirit who created and peopled the land-
scape. Accordingly, the figure holds special and unique significance.
The appellation ‘The Cave of the Serpents’, or ‘Langi Ghiran Site 1’,
offers a different representation again. Red pigment has been applied by
finger or brush execution to create 24 different types of motifs in a visu-
ally unique and rich composition. Serving potentially a ceremonial or
ritualistic function, contemporary conjecture ‘re-interprets’ the mural as
a landscape map:
134 D. S. Jones
The principal figure in the painting is that of a man wearing a chignon and
shown in profile … In his hand he holds a snake, not a “disproportionately
large boomerang.” The tail of the snake ends the nondescript design which is
seen on the left. The round designs are water-holes or lakes surrounded by reeds.
The two club-like objects are fish, perhaps eels, and the long, upright ladder on
the right another snake.
While the re-interpretation may be conjecture, it does sketch an inter-

esting vision, linking it perhaps to a bora stone pattern at Lake Wongan.
The latter site also holds totemic symbolism. Nonetheless, the mural ‘rep-
resents a particularly uncommon aspect of prehistoric Aboriginal culture’.
The ground sculpture of a Bunyip at Bamerong waterhole near ‘South
Challicum’ was an alternate form of expression. The image, apparently
once regularly cut on turf on the banks of a tributary to P are.in.gid.gid.
galler [Fiery Creek], is now non-existent due to grass growth, cattle graz-
ing, and the lack of periodic initiation ceremonies to re-trace the earthen
contour. Its presence, however, would have shifted the image into the
mythological landscape as it was a favourite character in ‘oral
literatures’.
Totemic centres, sites that were the final resting places, miyurs, reser-
voirs of spirit-children, or linked to totem animals, are implicit in
Aboriginal mythology. Their locations and purposes were not communi-
cated to enmity clans or colonials so their role within the mythology on
waark is uncertain. The Cave of the Serpents may be the centre for
Kartuk, the ancestral Carpet Snake for the Gamadj [black cockatoo] moi-
ety. Other centres may also have existed.
Near the base of Mt Hamilton in waark, at Pura Pura, is a lava sink-
hole that was known as Purra Purra [Red Kangaroos]. The lack of easy
accessibility to its clear spring water to both Aboriginal and kuuræ [kan-
garoo] may imply that it was a sacred place to the Kangaroo ancestor. It
may also represent the starting point of Purra’s flight from Duan [the
Gliding Possum] to Mokepilly and thence northward into Nyawi [Sunset
Country], creating the Wimmera River in his tracks and Guru [Lake
Hindmarsh] and Ngelbakutya [Lake Albacutya] as his resting places. The
curious rock hole with natural bridge may hold more mystic significance
than is presently comprehended.
Deen maar [Lady Julia Percy Island], off the coast near Yambuk, and a
‘connecting’ cave on the mainland, Tarn wirrink, have been recognised as
totemic centres where ‘clans and phratries go … until reincarnated’.
On the sea coast, opposite Deen Maar … there is a haunted cave called Tarn
wirring, ‘road of the spirit’, which, the natives say, forms a passage between the
mainland and the island. When anyone dies in the neighbourhood, the body is
wrapped in grass and buried; and if, afterwards, grass is found at the mouth of
the cave, it is proof that a good spirit, called Puit puit chepetch, has removed the
body and everything belonging to it through the cave to the island, and has
conveyed its spirit to the clouds; and if a meteor is seen about the same time, it
is believed to be fire taken up with it. Should fresh grass be found near the cave,
when no recent burial has taken place, it indicates that someone has been mur-
dered, and no person will venture near it till the grass decays or is removed.
The cave looks out to Deen maar, on the end of a series of desolate
rocky crags appropriately called ‘The Craigs’, with whistling zephyrs con-
veying spirits of the dead. It is known to be a totemic centre from whence
dead spirits were conveyed up into the cloud landscape.
If these natural sites were affixed with meanings, or were places with
some form of artistic display to commemorate a myth, then installations
especially created on the earthen surface must equally demonstrate ritu-
alistic importance.
On a little basalt islet in Lake Wongan … I observed an ancient Aboriginal

work consisting of extensive rows of large stones, forming passages up and down,
like a maze, at the foot of a little hill. A semicircular walk, ten feet wide [3 m],
has been made by clearing and smoothing the rough rocky surface up the hill
and down again leading into the maze. This work was possibly executed for the
purpose of carrying on some mystic rites, or probably only the amusement of
running between the rows of stones and up the hill and down again.
This stone alignment bora, holding some totemic significance, has

been disturbed over time losing its ‘semicircular walk’. Spreading 15 ×
31 m, its embodiment, however, still expresses the potentiality that it
fulfilled a major totemic role, though its purpose is now lost. The iconog-
raphy of the stone arrangements, forming walls as high as 60 cm, is
136 D. S. Jones
reminiscent of the ochre images portrayed in The Cave of the Serpents

shelter—though in a different language Country—or could represent
kuurnwill [snake], puunyart [eel], or kuuræ passages.
‘Glenaber 1’ alignment, north of Boloke [Lake Bolac] consists of two
elliptical arcs of about 150 boulders with a curious triangular head.
Although some stones have been moved for house and road construction,
the image is reminiscent of the ovate shaped alignment at the Mt Rothwell
Archaeological Site that served a ceremonial role. ‘Glenaber 2’ alignment,
further north, retains similar proportions to ‘Glenaber 1’, but colonial
traditions assert it was a stone sheep fold. The structure ‘remains an
enigma’ as it may have been a colonial adaptation of a stone alignment. A
stone configuration may also have existed on top of Kolerer [Mt Rouse].
For colonials, there was a cultural desire to link ‘stone-circles’ or stone
‘lines’ with spectres of ancient mythic rituals analogous to those at
Avebury or Stonehenge. ‘Probably they were originally consecrated to
religious uses; or, what is more probable still, they were tombs before they
were temples’. The fascination was instigated by an article in Chambers’
Miscellany (c.1872) where
such stone-circles … were from ten to one hundred feet [3 to 30 m] in diame-

ter, and in some there was an inner circle. The stones varied in size and shape,
and human bones had been dug out of mounds near these circles. The Aborigines
had no traditions respecting them, and they invariably denied all knowledge of
their origin.
If the expectation was there in looking forward to discovering some

ancient monument, the comprehension and subtleness of sites were not
realised by the colonials. Irregular sandstone outcroppings, with their
repeated diorite rubbing groove marks, at Burumboluk [Berrambool] on
‘Nareeb-nareeb’ or near Gellibrand, belie their importance in Aboriginal
culture as major artifice manufacturing sites. Similarly, the extensive
stone yere.roc fisheries on numerous streams and swamps belie the inge-
nious swamp managerial talents in maintaining aquatic-based food
resources. Burial sites and clusters of mirnyongs were also accorded little
attention. They were progressively burnt, disturbed by grazing cattle and
sheep, or razed through ploughing actions in subsequent phases.
Attention at burial sites was on detail, ritualistic patterns, and the need
to dispose hygienically the body flesh. There was also a landscape scene
constructed for each pyre and final burial location. Pyres should not also
be confused with mirnyongs of camping places, although mirnyongs did
on certain occasions become muuru kowuutung or muuruup kaakee
[ghostly places] to Aboriginals. Such experiential scenes disappeared in
the winds and with the passing seasons into the broader landscape, but
their sites still held symbolic, often sacred, meaning to Aboriginals.
* * *
There were also myths that explained the presence and form of particular
hills, streams, lakes, gaps, and depressions in the District. Land features
were deeply and irrevocably tied to particular Dreaming actors. They pro-
vided information, located home Country’s, warned of apparitions, and
collectively tied a regional mass of clans together spiritually by their con-
sistent set of narrated statements.
A number of other explanations were later recorded about landscape
features. Karriitch [Australites], peculiar black stones strewn on waark,
were believed to be magic stones returned ‘home’ after a mission of medi-
cine. A clump of trees on the banks of Tarnpirr, near Wuukuurn
[Darlington], with the appellation Karriitch denoted the location of their
source. The Taap heear waterholes near Minjaar [‘Minjah House’] pur-
portedly were created by an ‘earthquake’, an event also experienced on
the lower Barng by three clans holding a ‘korroboræ’. Sounds, ‘like the
galloping of horses’ accompanied by violent ground shaking ‘ran about
and pushed up blackfellows’, are Puulornpuul’s recollections of the event.
But these were earthly landscapes. Above, held up by great props, was
the immense landscape of the dark sky. In this sky, Fomalhaut repre-
sented Bunjil [the Eaglehawk], and the hunting ground of the Barnk [the
Milky Way] was believed to be where, symbolically, Aboriginals [large
stars] chased game [small stars] into the ‘coal sack of the ancient mari-
ners—that dark space in the milky way near the constellation of the
Southern Cross’—called Torong.
138 D. S. Jones
There were also stories linking the stars to Dreaming ancestors and
mythological events on the earth. Stars remained the eternal bright eyes
of their earthly entities.
Spirits and ancestors also lived in or were linked to landscape features.
Purra Purra [the Red Kangaroo Ancestor] had her miyur or ‘sacred water’
at Pura Pura, and Waa had his at Dyurnera in the upper Glenelg valley.
Buurt-kuuruuk, a Aboriginal woman devil, ‘as tall as a gum tree’ and usu-
ally accompanied by her ‘dark-coloured bandicoot’, lived along and near
the mouth of Barng. Neulam-kurrk, in the image of an old woman, lived
in the sink-holes, caves, and depressions along Pare.in.gid.gid.galler [Fiery
Creek] and devoured children. Muuruup neung kuurn tarrong’gnat, or the
‘devil in the moon’ spirit also took children. Colbumatuan-kuurk, who
lived near Pare.in.gid.gid.galler, was a strong and violent wind. Orokeets,
‘two imaginary evil spirits’, male and female, lived in the ‘home of the
Black Cockatoo’ near Larneejeeing. They could appear with the appari-
tion of a partial eclipse, and placed fear in the minds of Aboriginals.
Mischievous Net-nets lived within the Stony Rises around Konda [Lake
Condah], where the feared ‘Black Ghost’, Mahrach, also walked. A
dreaded but great serpent, Myndie, lived in a waterhole at Warrebaal. The
Muuruup, ‘sometimes called “Wambeen neung been-been aa” or “maker of
bad-smelling smoke”’ lived at Ummekulleen deep underground but could
kill people on the surface with lightning. Malignant spirits also lived in
the medicinal spring waters of Lurtpii below Kolerer. And, of course,
there were also the Bunyips who lived in waterholes and deep lakes
including Bamerong near ‘South Challicum’, in Tarnpirr, in the reeds of
the Wannon, in Lake Buninjon, in a spring called Wuurong killing near
‘Mount Fyans’, or in the dark waterholes of Barnk [the Milky Way].
There are undoubtedly many more stories explaining landscape cre-
ation, and its spiritual inhabitants within features, that are untold. These
collectively comprise part of the sacred, hidden voices in Country.
4.8 Country Dreaming Tapestry

Cascading from this qualitative narrative assessment, a number of traits
are clearly evident per theme.
In terms of the Domains theme, the evident traits are: a sense of pur-
poseful responsibility to care for the landscapes’ biological health was
enshrined in Aboriginal belongingness to their hereditary Country and
knowledge of one’s location, positioned within the greater Dreaming
map, explained a Aboriginal’s role and responsibility to that landscape;
space was multi-layered in purpose and role, and divided in responsibility
according to language, moiety descendancy and land usage thresholds,
but interconnected by neutral and collective tracts, places, and pathways;
boundaries were distinctive yet permeable and often extensive according
to environmental factors and the relevant myths and traditions; spatial
delimitation recognised equity of resource access and communal sharing
of spaces and resources during times and seasons of little or plenty, and
Country often involved two or more ecosystems; ‘title’ to Country was
validated by knowledge and expression of the place names, myths, and
songs relevant to that tract; linguistic commonalities were a binding
thread in ‘estate’ delimitation and clan activities; the volume of space and
the intensity of occupation prompted the creative and equitable dissec-
tion of landscape through subtle means, having regard to rich natural
habitats or tracts; place names were an extremely important element in
the landscape, and they identified space, acted as signposts, celebrated
past events, and re-ignited the mythic consciousness of Aboriginals; and,
each name possessed a library of knowledge that could be instructional or
informative, and could pertain to mythological events and passages, con-
temporary Aboriginal history and incidents, or bio-geographical infor-
mation about the resources, micro-climatic patterns, or geographical
form of the site.
For Pathways, traits evident are: journeying through landscape was
necessary to enable the acquisition of mythological, symbolic and bio-
logical information about Country and about the songlines that traversed
it, and that pathways were the vehicle to permit this acquisition; major
pathways and songlines generally correlate to neutral trade routes, the
criss-crossing passage ways of mythic Dreaming ancestors, and to north-
south natural corridors which were aligned with or linked to perennial
water sources; pathways interconnected places of trade, ceremony, arti-
fice, harvest and hunt, and facilitated the transfer of artefacts, raw mate-
rial, foodstuffs, news, stories, and myths; and pathways were
140 D. S. Jones
characteristically aligned to perennial watercourses or natural breaks and

valleys in topography coming together at junctures in these landscape
features.
For Gathering Places, traits evident are: three functionally and loca-
tionally distinct types of places were resident in the landscape, and each
played a major role in the system of rules, traditions, and patterns
observed by Aboriginal inhabitants; places for daily living were often stra-
tegically located for view, water, and shelter needs, and at junctures of
micro-environments, they were regularly occupied according to season
and climate to service semi-sedentary hunting, gathering, cooking, weav-
ing, and artifice production activities; places of sacred meaning, and they
were infrequently visited, often located at or adjacent to unusual natural
features or amphitheatres, they serviced ceremonial, spiritual and myth
nurturing activities, and held deep symbolic meanings; places for cultural
interaction: seasonally visited, they were often large open spaces that
afforded perennial water to service and space to accommodate large gath-
erings, and were linked to either major trade or food harvesting and shar-
ing events.
For Shelter, traits evident are: stone (or scoria, unquarried bluestone)
was the dominant form giving raw material used in the assembly of
human engineered or constructed works and in the fabrication and com-
position of artefacts, and in contrast timber provided, often, a secondary
role in either supporting or propping structures, or acting as a temporary
structural material; shelter construction took advantage of available tim-
ber, and stone when timber was limited, and had regard to micro-climatic
issues in their design and form.
For Vegetation, traits evident are: while the predominant and charac-
teristic community of the landscape was a rich complex of savannah
grasses the monotony was broken and enriched by expanses of savannah
woodlands, riparian or saline threads or niches, and shrubby stony rises,
and breaks in these expanses provided resources and opportunities not
available on the open volcanic plains to both human and animal popula-
tions; vegetation was regularly renourished by conscious cultural burn-
ings and natural agriculture which stimulated species regeneration and
seed diffusion; vegetation fibres and timbers were important raw materi-
als in the fabrication and composition of artefacts relevant to daily
hunting, gathering and cooking routines; incremental and continuous

Aboriginal landscape activities, albeit tangibly small, had cumulative and
important effects upon the District’s vegetation mosaic; roots, berries,
fruits, bark, leaves, and so on of vegetation provided a rich and diverse
resource of dietary and medicinal substances that could maintain and
sustain animal and human populations throughout the seasons.
For Animals, traits evident are: the spectrum of animals resident in the
landscape occupied a powerful presence and an often controlling influ-
ence over Aboriginal experiences and relationships, both day and night,
and as part of a larger biological food cycle; Aboriginals maintained spe-
cial kinships and bonds with animals through mytho-totemic connexions
and celebrated their presence and aura in myth, story, song, and tale;
fishery management technology, through imaginative and extensive net-
works of impoundments, basins, and dikes from available stone, pro-
longed water retention throughout the year to the advantage of fish,
animal, and human; selective and indirect management of important
animal resources—eels, fish, kangaroos, emus, bird eggs—resulted in sea-
sonally reliable food resources; acting as influential mediators, Aboriginals
ensured a long-standing ecological balance in the roles, predator relation-
ships, and the fecundity of animals against population imbalances or del-
eterious impacts upon vegetative food resources; important seasons for
animal food resources were Winter and Summer in contrast to plant food
resources that were lean; sheltered perennial fresh and salt water bodies
were a major focus for animal habitats and roaming catchments, and a
determinant of daily and migratory movement patterns; Aboriginal ide-
ology invested religious responsibilities in individuals and clans purposely
to ensure the perpetuation of species associated with particular beings in
anticipation of the return of Dreaming ancestors; incremental and con-
tinuous Aboriginal landscape activities, albeit tangibly small, had cumu-
lative and important manipulative effects upon controlling faunal and
avifaunal populations and habitats in the District.
For Imagery, traits evident are: locations in the landscape were often
land-based anchorages, or parts of constellations of site in lineal passage-
ways, that were announced and explained by myth or oral literature, of
which each was an aural and experiential page containing biological data,
moral codes and traditions, or Aboriginal ‘histories’; peculiar natural
142 D. S. Jones
landscape features were often appropriated as installations to celebrate

these myths and literatures, or installations were specifically constructed
at sites linked to Dreaming passages or events, or individual passages into
this metaphysical domain; each locational ‘voice’ was a signpost or notice-
board of societal rules, traditions or ‘histories’ that steered Aboriginal
responsibilities and attitudes for the future, relationships to the past, and
their obligations to the landscape.
* * *
Allen et al. (1992): 6, 24; Anon (1990a): 8–9; Anon (1990b): 4–5; Barker
(1976): 225–239; Basso (1986): 95, 101–116; Berndt and Berndt
(1988): 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 14, 15–17, 18; Berndt (1964): 258–295; Berndt
(1982): 4; Bird and Frankel (1991): 1–16; Bonwick (1970): 41; Bride
(1969): 66, 96–97, 271, 272, 273,395, 399; Calder (1987): 73–75;
Casey (1938): 130–133; Chatwin (1987): 11–14, 72–73; Chauncy
(1972): 233, 234–236; Clark (1983): 32–37; Clark (1987): 2–3, 15–16,
20, 21, 23, 26; Clark (1988); 9, 19, 24, 82, 83, 112; Clark (1990a): 1–5,
8, 12, 15–16, 17–18, 153, 167–168, 183, 192, 214–215, 217; Clark
(1990b): 97–130; Clark (1990c): 83, 101–103, 105, 108–110, 112–117,
121, 126–127, fn. 21; Clark (1991): 43, 47; Clarke (1986): 40–47;
Costermans (1981); Coutts and Lorblanchet (1982); Coutts (1981): 2.3;
Coutts (1982): 99–105, 154–162, 178; Coutts (1985): 21–67; Coutts
et al. (1977b): 1–47; Coutts et al. (1977a): 195–197, 198–199, 200–202;
Coutts et al. (1978): 10, 13, 197–199; Critchett (1984): 19; Critchett
(1990): 13, 19–20, 26, 39–41, 45, 47 fn 31, 55–57, 58–59, 60–63, 69,
105; Dawson (1881): viii, li, lx, lxxx, lxxxi, lxxxii, lxxxiii, lxxiv, lxxix, 1,
2, 3, 4, 7, 8–9, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18–21, 22, 24, 25, 48–50, 51–53, 54,
56–57, 58, 59, 63, 72–79, 81, 88, 89, 90–96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103–104,
105–106, 107–108; Doolan (1979): 161–168; Emison (1990): 8, 9, 10;
Emison et al. (1975): 3; Flood (1983): 147, 159; Flood (1986): 16–18;
Flood (1990): 216–220; Flood (1990): 220–228; Fowell (1991): 12;
Frankel (1982a): 43–45; Frankel (1982b): 89–97; Frankel (1991):
74–85, 87–93; Gott and Conran (1991): 1–3, 6–7, 8–23, 24–37, 41–47,
50–52, 56, 57, 60, 63, 64–65, 66; Gott (1982a): 59–67; Gott (1982b):
13–17; Gott (1983): 2–18; Gott (1985): 3–14; Gott (1987): 37–51, 54,
58, 66; Gunn (1983a): 1–40; Gunn (1983b) 94–123; Gunn (1987):
52–63; Hallam (1985): 7–20; Halls (1967): 4–13; Hamilton (1969):
223; Head (1989): 37, 41, 42, 110, 113, 115; Holmgren (1991): 4–5;
Horton (1979): 28–34; Horton (1982): 237–251; Horton (1984a, b):
639–680; Howitt (1904): 69, 120–125, 128; Hughes and Sullivan
(1981): 277–278; Jones (1969): 224–228; Jones (1975): 21–34; Jones
(1991a); Jones (1991b): 21–48; Kenyon (1912): 71, 102; Kenyon
(1928): 140, 143, 146, 150, 152, 158; Kenyon (1930): 71–75, 140;
Kershaw (1984): 701; Kiddle (1962): 122, 129–130; Kirkland (1969):
179, 191, 198, 199, 201; Lane and Fullagar (1980): 134, 139–147; Lang
et al. (1952): 29–30; Lawlor (1991): 48, 104–105, 125–126, 127,
235–238; Lourandos (1976): 174–193; Lourandos (1977): 216–218;
Lourandos (1980): 249–250; Lourandos (1985): 385–423; Lourandos
(1987): 293–307; Magazanik (1992); Maiden (1975): 42–44, 135;
Massola (1957a): 63–66; Massola (1957b): 19–22; Massola (1957c):
76–83; Massola (1960): 188–191; Massola (1961a): 66–69; Massola
(1961b): 238–239; Massola (1962a): 275–277; Massola (1962b): 162;
Massola (1962c): 110–111; Massola (1968a): 3–6, 13, 14–15, 21–24,
28, 29–31, 34–35, 36–37, 38–40, 53, 54–55, 56–58, 59, 60, 62, 69–70,
75–76, 78–84, 104, 105–106, 108–109, 111, 112, 113, 141, 142,
147–148, 150–154,165, 167, 168, 170–171, 172, 173–174, 198;
Massola (1968b): 197–200; Massola (1968c): 132–136; Massola
(1968d): 317–320; Massola (1973): 126–131; Mathews (1904a): 62,
66–68; Mathews (1904b): 281–282, 293, 297, 364, 365–367, 369;
Mathews (1907): 47–48; McBryde (1978): 354–382; McBryde (1984a):
132–153; McBryde (1984b): 267–285; McBryde (1986): 79, 84, 88, 89,
90; McGregor and Oaten (1985): 2, 14–15; Merrilees (1968): 1–24;
Mitchell (1965): Vol. 1, 211–212, 216, 237, 253–254, 255–256, 269,
270, 272, 273, Vol. 2, 256, 257, 259, 274, 332, 333; Mortlake Historical
Society Book Committee (1985): 8; Müller-Willie (1984): 2–7; Mulvaney
(1964): 427–429; Myers (1986): 54; O’Neill (1993a): 11, 22; O’Neill
(1993b): 11; Patton (1930): 161, 185, 186; Powell (1992): 215–216;
Presland (1977a): 7, 43, 70, 83; Presland (1977b): 11, 14, 15, 18, 26, 35,
36, 42–43, 44, 48, 49, 60, 62, 64, 65, 71–73, 84, 85–86, 87, 91, 93,
115, 117, 118; Presland (1980): 50–51, 56, 58, 59, 65–66, 70, 71A, 80,
89, 91–92, 102–103, 105, 106, 109, 111, 119, 124, 137, 141, 148,
144 D. S. Jones
Figs. 15, 16, 23, 24; Pyne (1990): 1132–1133; Pyne (1991): 79–83;
Robson (1987): 12, 17, 18; Ruhe (1986): 30; Scarlett (1988): 146–147;
Shaw (1969): 68; Singh (1982): 90–108; Smyth (1972): vol 1, xxxvi, 1,
8, 34, 124, 126, 139–141, 191, 196, 242–243, 434, 435–444, vol
2234–235; Society for Growing Australian Plants Maroondah, Inc.
(1991); Stanbridge (1861): 299–300; Stanner (1965): 1–26; Stapylton
(1971): 110, 117; Stuwe (1986): 6, 22–23; Sutton (1916): 119–121;
Taylor (1976): 34–43; Tindale (1957): 31; Tunbridge (1987): 2–4; Watt
(1986): 19–22; West (1971): 67; Williams (1984): 182, 187; Williams
(1987): 310–311, 312, 314, 316–320; Willingham (1983): 146; Willis
(1964a): 12–13; Willis (1964b): 397–398, 404; Willis (1984): 27; Zola
and Gott (1992): 1–4, 6–9, 15, 25, 30, 31, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43,
44, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58–64.
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Heritage Trust.
5
1830–1870: Colonial Noontide
5.1 Designs and Reflections

In short, the thing is impossible; the river is doomed to a mere prosaic existence,
as the Scotch lawyers say, ‘while grass grows and water runs’: it can never be
immortalized in Australian song.
John Dunmore Lang, Phillipsland, …, 1847
* * *
Landscapes expressed on paper are an institutionalised Western relation-

ship. We document our relationship in notes, texts, titles, and land claims
and erect or position tangible installations on the landscape to express
our individualistic and materialistic motivations and economic con-
structs. In contrast, Aboriginal ‘documentation’ is by way of songs, place
names, and oral literatures, with often intangible tracings, that are nested
in the kernels of their social and religious structures.
To the colonial bureaucrat, the perceived territory of Australia Felix
presented a ‘fair blank sheet’, available
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_5
156 D. S. Jones
for any geographical arrangement, whether of county divisions—lines of com-

munication—or sites of towns, &c. &c … . The plan of a whole state might be
arranged there, like that of an edifice, before the foundation is laid, and a solid
one seems necessary, where a large superstructure is likely to be built.
The Bureaucrats Domain (1989) was a cartographer’s dream. The

dream, however, became a nightmare because squatters invaded the
‘blank sheet’ before the surveyor had set foot, and successive politically
devised systems of land selection and tenure, during the second and third
phases, constantly redrew the rules and paper regimes.
The colonial sprawl also heralded a propensity to name features and
places in the landscape after places at home, after descriptive referents of
the places, or after corrupted versions of Aboriginal words or names. The
activity was to conquer the ‘blank canvas’ through naming, thereby allow-
ing its easy analysis and documentation. Appellations proliferated with
run and station establishment. They diffused throughout the ‘explored’
landscape and attached designations to points and landmarks, often with
folk derivatives. Names were applied to the new fauna, flora, and avi-
fauna although some were corruptions of English or Scottish or Irish
appellations or language already been applied in the Counties of
Cumberland around Sydney Town. As land became dissected by survey,
names were affixed to enable the administration of subdivisions, and
enclosed paddocks on runs acquired their own referents.
The extensive layer of Aboriginal names was tacitly acknowledged.
Corrupted, forgotten, mistranslated, and inaccurately applied, they were
only adopted in nomenclature through European inquisitiveness in com-
munications with Aboriginals.
Figure 5.1 depicts the places and homesteads mentioned in this section.
The first part of this section reviews the relationships to land ‘owner-
ship’ and ‘delineation’ applied in the second phase. A belief in terra nul-
lius enabled the transferability of European notions of land definition
that were articulated in legislation, systems of tenure, and the physical
marking of the landscape surface to express ownership. Long-standing
metaphysical traditions of Aboriginal Country’s and systems of landscape
occupancy disintegrated in the path of this materialistic culture. The sec-
ond part surveys the diffusion of names in this phase. A conscious trend
5 1830–1870: Colonial Noontide 157
Fig. 5.1 Places and homesteads

158 D. S. Jones
was the need to assist landscape familiarity, thereby endorsing Euro-

centric values of land ownership, taming, and mapping. Names on paper
represented resources ripe for exploitation. Europeans needed them to
know ‘where I am’, to obtain the ‘wealth of “[economic] meaning” in the
fullest sense’ from the landscape. A new identity was etched on the ‘blank
canvas’ to cloak the grasslands with ‘signposts’ of a new ‘common’ and
written knowledge.
* * *
To the surveyor, Mitchell, in 1836, the ‘flowery plains and green hills’
were but ‘a fair blank sheet’ of Crown land: a cartographer’s dream. The
‘haziness in the air prevented … [him] from perceiving clearly the distant
horizon’, and the clouds of Western ideologies permitted a colonial arro-
gance that characterised Indigenous inhabitants as lacking social struc-
tures or possessing formal residency in those ‘verdant plains’.
To terra nullius—‘no man’s land’—colonials laid claim to and squatted
upon tracts of the landscape. The lack of distinct visual representations
and traces of fences, structures, symbols of culture and technology belied
what was extant within the landscape. Instead:
No trace of man or habitation was there, ‘nor roof nor latched door’.
But the ‘light which never was on sea or shore’ was there, to shed a celestial
glory over the untilled, unfenced, half-unknown waste.
On the eve of the second phase, an ‘explorer’ could venture fearlessly

across the landscape unobstructed. Colonists could squat upon tracts of
landscape, erect ‘primitive’ structures in which to live, and let flocks of
sheep or herds of cattle greedily browse the claimed pastures. A claim by
possession was the prerequisite to the granting of a pastoral licence for the
‘run’ of the landscape. Issue of a run licence encouraged the squatter to
make any improvements necessary to return a profit, and legally to delin-
eate the run by etching lines on the earth’s surface or by cutting signature
notches in clumps or corridors of trees. Yet even this delineation was fic-
tional truth until officially sanctioned: ‘there is but one thing on which I
find persons all agree and that is that you are to believe nobody’.
The ‘blank sheet’ prompted imagined paper landscapes that were based
upon landscape features without metaphysical associations. Defined as
two-dimensional spaces, they used an amalgam of vaguely positioned
lines, landscape features or structures, and natural boundaries.
In the interregnum of such divisions, runs were organised and formed.
Colonial stations or runs of some 8000–20,250 ha were carved out of the
terra nullius, on top of Aboriginal Country’s under a new set of social and
economic mental structures that, least of all, sheep and kangaroos com-
prehended nor respected.
Central to this land division was the transferral of Crown tenure sys-
tems, which evolved in feudal England in 1290, to the Australian conti-
nent. Land was held feudally to the King or Crown under ‘fee simple’, or
as estate or leasehold in remainder, under a system called Old or General
Law. The latter title formed the basis of licences. Subsequent allocation of
Pre-emptive Rights and sale of land in fee simple under the General Law
system, by the lodgement and registration of documents, established a
colonial version of map anchorages and oral literatures. Until replaced by
the Torrens system in 1862, it formed an over-arching system of socially
structured land ownership and easement provision, and thereby ensured
a sense of land familiarity and security, in the second phase.
* * *
Paper rules structured the identification, delineation, and tenure of land

while the colonial bureaucracy caught up with the squatting sprawl. For
the squatter, tenure security encouraged a greater sense of responsibility
in maintaining and improving the quality of the run for the benefit of
the flocks.
Initially runs were occupied in the ‘unsettled districts’ on an annual
£10 licence paid to the Crown, with a tax levy per head of livestock car-
ried, and no limit on size. Under this system, the Crown Land Occupation
Act (1836) gave no security of tenure and deterred any investment in
improvements such as fencing, housing, woolsheds, except garden culti-
vation. It also encouraged an attitude of ruthless exploitation of natural
resources, unless the land was within a ‘settled district’. Under this Act
only land in ‘settled districts’ could be acquired. For example, part of
160 D. S. Jones
‘Golf Hill’ run was partially bought in ‘five sections on [the Leigh River],
commanding a frontage of upwards five miles [8.0 km]’, containing
1712 ha with the rest held in squatting leasehold under licence, but was
managed as an integrated whole.
Special Surveys were permissible from March 1841. Surveys allowed
the acquisition of at least 2072 ha (or 20.7 km2) in an unbroken tract for
about 24 s. a hectare (12 s./acre), later increased to about £2 a hectare
(£1/acre). Under this provision, the Rutledge Survey and ‘Cherongemarah’
were acquired amidst much controversy.
The Sale of Waste Lands Act (1846), the Waste Lands Occupation Act
(1846), and the Order-in-Council (1847) resolved much of the uncer-
tainty about land tenure. Occupation outside the ‘settled districts’ was
altered to permit 14-year leases, an annual licence fee to the Crown of
£10 with a tax per head of livestock, a threshold of 51.8 km2 per run, and
a carrying capacity of not ‘more than 4000 sheep or 500 head of cattle, or
a mixed herd of sheep and cattle, equal to either 500 head of cattle or 400
sheep’. The opportunity to acquire a maximum of 259 ha at about £2 a
hectare surrounding a ‘homestead’ by ‘right of pre-emption’, and the first
right to buy the whole or part of the ‘improved’ run at the expiration of
the lease, were also available. Pastoral lease and Pre-emptive Right acqui-
sition were subject to survey (the ‘marking off and drawing [of ] plans
of … runs’), the erection of a ‘homestead’, and associated ‘improvements’.
Boundary disputation was subject to authoritarian adjudications of
Commissioners for Crown Lands. Land within 4.8 km of the sea, or
16 km from Portland, could also be acquired as fee simple freehold under
General Law given its redesignation as a ‘settled district’. Pre-emptive
Rights involved the marking of an invisible rectangle in the landscape by
pegs or survey stones, whereas Pastoral leasehold required the delineation
of runs by furrow, notch, and quill. Both, once completed, enabled the
transfer of run leases by sale and purchase. With increased security of
tenure, run holders started station building programmes, including the
‘improvements’ of fencing, land clearing, homestead and woolshed con-
struction, and flock breeding.
The tide of selection calls, for ‘opening the land’, increased as the prof-
itability of gold mining decreased in the late 1850s. These calls were not
satisfied by the loophole-ridden Nicholson Land Act (1860), or the
amended Duffy Land Act (1862), as both continued the squatting lease
stranglehold on the landscape through ‘dummys’. Nonetheless, farm
selection was achieved in some localities. The principle of selection before
survey permitted farms between 16.2 and 259 ha to be acquired from the
Crown at about £2 a hectare, or on a probationary lease at about 2 s. a
hectare, subject to ‘improvements’ and plant cultivation on part thereof.
Hidden in the Order-in-Council (1847), in section 9, was a far-reaching
provision that enabled the survey of ‘township’ reserves. These designated
reserves were also exempt from pastoral leases and Pre-emptive Right
acquisition. This provision expanded upon the intent of the Bathurst
Instructions (1825) or ‘locationally non-specific guidelines’, and the Ripon
Regulations (1833) which permitted sale by auction of Crown lands and
the reservation of lands for public purposes or works. Under all three
regulations or orders, land could be set aside for ‘township’ purposes, for
utility reserves, or for the protection of environmental resources, thus
continuing traditional British land-use needs and arrangements.
The consequences of the Order-in-Council, however, were more far-
reaching. First, an acceleration of ‘township’ site surveys and proclama-
tions occurred, though often invalidating established private
entrepreneurial activities at river crossings, lakesides, and good camp
sites. These reserves officially endorsed a sense of place, value, and pro-
spectivity upon potential ‘township’ sites. Second, a diversification of
reserve identification and survey was instigated to resume land for min-
eral resources, Aboriginal Protectorate Stations, water and river side
reserves, recreational purposes, and timber production, albeit based upon
rudimentary environmental knowledge. The Land Acts (1860 and 1862)
reiterated and expanded the nature of ‘township’ reserves under the
notion of ‘public purpose’ Crown land reserves and offered an avenue for
a greater amount of land to be reserved through public petitions.
By 1853, land designation for ‘township’ and ‘public purposes’ in the
Portland Bay pastoral District totalled 82 reserves on 1048.8 km2 of land.
This comprised some 37.5% of ‘township’ reserve hectarage set aside
under the Order-in-Council for the entire colony of Victoria. ‘Township’
reservations and surveys in the District included 40.5 ha set aside for a
‘church, glebe and a school’ around the Kilnoorat manse, a reserve around
Lake Bolac for salt extraction, water frontage reservations on the Glenelg,
162 D. S. Jones
Leigh, Woady Yalloak, and Hopkins Rivers, and around Lakes

Corangamite, Purrumbete, Colac, and Bolac, the designation of
Aboriginal Reservations at Mt Rouse, Pirron Yallock, and Birregurra, and
the completion of township surveys at places including Orford (1856),
Hawkesdale (1860), Macarthur (1857), the Grange (1840), Mortlake
(1853), and Skipton (1852).
Most parish and allotment surveys were also completed by the 1850s
and 1860s by surveyors plotting and pegging the landscape on geometric
co-ordinates. The north-south east-west axes on the flat plains were ideal
for the easy triangulation and division of the landscape into allotments
for secure acquisition and transfer under General Law. Surveying aided
the alienation of Crown land and squatting leases. This process was facili-
tated in the Order-in-Council and subsequent Land Acts (1860 and 1862).
Grid lines running relentlessly north-south and east-west dissected the
landscape to create allotments, road reserves and stock routes, and ‘town-
ship’ reserves, providing the pathways for subsequent fencing activities
that linked isolated wooden survey pegs in the grasses and woodlands.
* * *
While the premise that Aboriginal Country’s had boundaries appears to

have been accepted by government officials and some squatters in this
phase, any formal attempt to collate ethnographic information and depict
spatial Country’s was left until the next phase. This was notwithstanding
the Chief Protectors’ pronouncement in 1842 that he would
commence a map of the province (purely Aboriginal) with the names of Districts
and localities, the national divisions of territory and sectional sub-divisions, as
also their numerical strength and political relation with the cheif [sic] men at
particular periods and any remarkable circumstance connected either with the
original inhabitants or the natural resources of the country.
Recognition of distinct territories and boundaries by the Lieutenant-

Governor was also clearly indicated in his instructions to the Chief
Protector ‘to obtain information on their number, location and disposi-
tion’ in the District in 1841 irrespective of the notion of terra nullius.
Aboriginal territoriality was also recognised in other correspondence and

speeches, where a
complete census … of the Aboriginal population …; also the boundaries and

aboriginal names of districts occupied by each tribe; … the difference of lan-
guage, customs, and habits of each tribe; with their political relation, whether
of amity or hostility
resulted in an insight that
each of these tribes has its own district of country—its extent at least, and in
some instances its district boundaries being well known to the neighbouring
tribes. The subdivision of the territory even went further than that; each family
had its own locality.
Other observations of clan relationships and activity patterns also vali-

dated these conclusions. Distinctions, including different native calls
peculiar to clans, different burial practices between Country’s, varying
body and facial decorations between clans, spatial arrangements of clan
camps in inter-tribal meetings reflected their geographical positions in
the landscape, linguistic similarities and dissimilarities, and the imagery
of ‘mainmait’ (‘strangers’ or ‘foreigners’ to their language and clan rela-
tionships) all promulgated differences. The difficulties were the problem-
atic identification of territory borders given the Aboriginal multi-layered
metaphysical treatment and relationship to landscape, phonetic mistran-
scriptions, non-linguistic fluency with clan languages, and the often
invisible or variable nature of what constituted a ‘boundary’. Consequently,
territories and boundaries were amorphous entities lacking distinction to
colonials because their full realm of mythological and cultural stories and
rules were never communicated to, nor comprehended by, the colonials.
Fear, or ‘mainmait’, was evidence of boundary crossings. The ability to
call out, chant, or ‘chat’ place names indicated familiarity and Country
security. Physical clarification of both was, however, thwarted by the
rapid colonial invasion and Aboriginal cultural disintegration. Aboriginal
voices, though, echoed both facets and a belongingness to a Country: ‘it
was their country, and the water belonged to them, and if it was taken
164 D. S. Jones
away they could not go to another country for they would be killed’. One
could only threaten ‘to murder the shephds unless they left the place’, ‘to
go or they would kill me’, or to ask the ‘Hutkeeper to go away and leave
them in possession of the hut’ in recognition that ‘that’s my country
belonging to me!!’, ‘Deen! deen! (here! here!)’. Respect of Aboriginal ter-
ritoriality, however, was understood by some colonials.
Each has its particular location and boundary beyond the limits of which they
seldom go except on special occasions when they visit each other; indeed they
appear to be under strong apprehensions if they by any circumstance are induced
[to pass] through [their] respective limits … In the course of our travelling in
cases of natives having been persuaded to accompany us, but upon their
approach to the boundary of another tribe they openly avowed their determina-
tion to leave or shrank away.
* * *
The principal function of paper rules was run or land delimitation. This
was first, and most cheaply, achieved by a plough line being etched on the
earth’s surface, until security of tenure encouraged the erection of timber
post and rail fences. In the interregnum timber hurdles in folds, tempo-
rary or mobile fence structures, secured flocks in the evenings or during
shearing.
Plough lines served as invisible fences until post and rail fences were
erected in the 1850s. Sheep and cattle, as well as kangaroos and emus,
grazed pastures of their choice oblivious to such human territorial mark-
ings, and Aboriginals probably pondered the metaphysical meanings
behind these strange linear surface etchings. A plough line represented a
‘boundary’ between runs. Lines, such as the furrows between ‘The Gums’
and ‘Blackwood’, or between ‘Mount Hesse’ and ‘Barunah Plains’, where
errant and unsupervised sheep were constantly ‘impounded’, existed
until a time when fences prevented these problems. A ‘plough furrow,
boundary’ between ‘Merrang’ and ‘Konawarren’ lasted into the 1860s,
both in practice and on government survey maps. ‘Wooriwyrite’ was
defined, in 1854, on three sides by furrow lines, marked trees, or dray
roads, with the fourth being Taylor’s River [Mt Emu Creek]. There were,
also, endless problems in determining these lines. Constant correspon-

dence, for example, on ‘Purrumbete’ in the mid-1840s evinced continu-
ous negotiations with ‘Jancourt’, ‘Marida Yallock’, ‘Chocolyn’,
‘Tandarook’, and ‘Glenormiston’ stations, and the Commissioner for
Crown Lands over boundary positions.
Felled timber was essential for vernacular fencing. Brush, or fold hur-
dles, and post and rail were the dominant forms. The former two pro-
vided the initial space delineation devices, and the latter was adopted
from the 1850s. ‘Caramut’, in 1841, had a ‘b[r]ush fence’ of stacked
timber and scrub around the homestead similar to that depicted in
Harton Hills (c.1840s). A sketch of Barton Hall, Grampians (c.1844)
depicts a woven split sapling fence around the homestead, and ‘Grassmere’
had a solid woven split slab fence constructed ‘by p[lac]ing two poles
upright in a hole and then laying heavy poles horizontal between them’
adjacent to the homestead. The main 1619 ha paddock on ‘Port Fairy’
was enclosed by the Merri and 4.8 km ‘of post and rail-fencing’, whereas
hurdles with a flair of carpentry were in use on ‘Wando Vale’: ‘Their
hurdles are sawn and stand on feet’. Brush fences were ‘simply the trees as
they are felled thrown along in long lines, and their branches piled upon
them’. River Red Gum post and rail fencing, commonly with 2.1 m long
posts and 2.7 m rails, were used in preference due to longevity and dura-
bility. Forms of fencing, however, depended upon need, available timber,
expertise, and the stage of station establishment.
Fences aided stock management. Their full economic benefits were,
however, not realised until the 1850s when they supplanted shepherds.
On the interim, hurdle yards, or the occasional stone-walled fold, pro-
vided evening enclosure of flocks. On ‘Squattlesea Mere’, a ‘heavy sub-
stantial fence’ of Four rails and a cap’ quartered cattle, a ‘large stockyard
of logs’ substituted for hurdles to restrain 200 cattle on ‘Merino Downs’
in 1839. Wood was still being carted from the Shelford forests to ‘Barunah
Plains’ in 1857 to enable the construction of hurdles. ‘Yalla-y-poora’
obtained ‘timber to make hurdles’, in 1844, from the Mt Cole forest.
Sheep were still folded in 1.8 × 1.1 m ‘hurdles made of rough scantlings’
on ‘Tarndwarncoort’ in the 1860s requiring some 48 hurdles, costing
about 1 s. each, to pen about 1000 sheep. Split post and two or three rail
fencing were used as boundary paddock stock fencing on ‘Purrumbete’ in
166 D. S. Jones
the late 1850s and early 1860s. Some 25.7 km of brush fencing, costing
£362, including wages, was erected on ‘Carngham’ in the 1850s. On
‘Eurambeen’, the cost was 1 s. a yard [0.914 m less rations in 1855, com-
pared to 4 s. a rod (5.29 m) of split timber fencing obtained from the Mt
Cole forests in 1856. By 1858, 1.6 km of post and rail, costing £42, had
been erected on ‘Langi Willi’ at a time when 5.6 km of wire fencing cost
only £70; by 1863, some 88.5 km of post and rail or wire fencing com-
pleted the ‘Langi Willi’ run enclosure.
Alternatives to timber fencing were scoria or dry stone walls, or the
later adopted wire. The first dry stone walls appeared in the late 1840s as
part of Pre-emptive Right delineation, being applied on ‘Purrumbete’ as
sophisticated crafted structures for cattle, and later rabbit control. Often
employing overhanging ‘copings’, projecting steps, and excavated foun-
dations, they created a strong visual feature. By 1857, a huge 6.7 km wall,
0.9–1.5 m wide at its base and 1.5–1.8 m high, had been erected on
‘Purrumbete’ along the southern and eastern perimeters to delimit cattle
and sheep pastures from the wilds of the Stony Rises. This structure fore-
shadowed walls of a similar but lesser scale around the run erected from
1856 to the 1880s. Locally produced Wire, however, had the advantage
of cheapness, ‘durability, tastefulness and security for fire’. Experiments
on ‘Golf Hill’, ‘Terrinallum’, ‘Glenormiston’, ‘Wando Vale’, ‘Eurambeen’,
and ‘Langi Willi’ in the late 1850s proved its value though it still needed
posts to support the wires.
* * *
Apart from survey landscape was also appropriated by names. Ownership

identification was eased by a new hierarchical system of land titles start-
ing at the regional County level, progressing downwards to Parishes,
Sections, and Allotments. ‘District’ became a uniting designation to
describe the volcanic plains landscape west of Melbourne and Geelong.
Counties and Parishes quickly acquired names that reinforced British and
Aboriginal associations, respectively and distinctively.
County names appear to have been allocated at the discretion of the
Survey Office in Sydney. They acquired a distinct English air to their
nomenclature. The names of Dundas, Normanby, Villiers, Hampden,
Ripon, and Grenville commemorated Henry Dundas, the Marquess of

Normanby, George Villiers, John Hampden, the Earl of Ripon, and Lord
William Grenville.
Parishes, in contrast, acquired known Aboriginal etymology linked to
geographical features within their bounds, or from corrupted Aboriginal
names of runs that they encompassed. Surveyor Charles Tyers, through
interviews with Aboriginals as early as 1840, documented some of their
names of hills, rivers, and other features in his survey maps, and applied
them in parish designations. Official motivation for use came from the
Colonial ‘policy to use Aboriginal names and the result is that a large
number of Aboriginal place names have survived’, but are hidden in par-
ish names. The origins of such a policy lie in Thomas Mitchell’s tenure as
NSW surveyor-general; an attitude also evinced in his use and documen-
tation of Aboriginal place names in his Three Expeditions into the Interior
of Eastern Australia (1838).
In the Counties of Dundas, Normanby, Villiers, Hampden, Ripon and
Grenville, Aboriginal or Aboriginal-derived nomenclature was used in
parish names in 58%, 75%, 75%, 65%, 84%, and 75% of cases. The
remaining names related to already-existing or surveyed townships or vil-
lages (or named features) such as Terang, Hamilton, Skipton, Streatham,
Heywood, Portland, Hexham, Woolsthorpe, Belfast, Dunkeld, Balmoral,
Mortlake, or Redruth. Many of the latter derive from English, Scottish,
and Gaelic appellations. Commemorative parish names after personali-
ties were rare. Many names also recall landscape features previously des-
ignated by Mitchell, such as Napier (Mt Napier), Linlithgow (Lake
Linlithgow), Hotspur, and Glenelg (Glenelg River). The pattern of
Aboriginal parish names began in the District with the first attempts at
rectangular surveys in Grenville, along the Geelong-Colac ‘road’, where
Modewarre, Lake Lake Wollard [sic], Karngun, Tutegong, Yan Yan Curt,
Birregurra, and Whoorel Parishes were plotted and named. Aboriginal
etymologies can be broken into appellations of places and features in the
landscape, or from previously adopted Aboriginal derived run names.
* * *
168 D. S. Jones
As squatters diffused out across the plains, selecting the choicest pas-
tures for their flocks, they claimed large tracts, or ‘runs’, of the landscape
comparable in size to peerage Duchys. Registration of claims required
that an appellation be affixed to the run for identification purposes. Run
names, however, appear to have been designated as an act of territorial
domination, before any bureaucratic requirements. These properties,
accordingly, acquired Aboriginal, generic, or names that recalled person-
alities or were derived from appellations affixed to geographical features
previously ‘discovered’ by Mitchell.
Run names identified a presence and a sense of personal domain. Names
chosen showed a distinct preference to Aboriginal nomenclature. They
were either phonetically corrupted appellations told to squatters by
Aboriginals as representing a ‘place’ or a feature on the run, or, often
unknowingly, geographical characteristics contained within the run. In the
Counties of Dundas, Grenville, Hampden, Ripon, Normanby, and Villiers,
Aboriginal or Aboriginal-derived terms were applied to 43%, 54%, 64%,
61%, 17%, and 37% of run names, respectively. The low figure for
Normanby is illustrative of its location at the head of the early south-
western expansion of squatters into the landscape, who showed a prefer-
ence to appellations across a broad range including generic appellations.
Notwithstanding the predominance of squatters with origins from the
Scottish Lowlands and Borders, or from the southern English counties,
there was only minimal usage of run names that recalled the villages or val-
leys of their homelands. In the Counties, runs carrying Scottish derived
appellations were 6%, 4%, 2%, 0%, 14%, and 5%, compared to English-
derived appellations that were 16%, 0%, 2%, 0%, 10%, and 7%, respectively.
Despite this pattern, there was a strong preference to generic place
names that celebrated the pastoral qualities of the landscape, or were
derivatives of names common in the British Isles. The latter included
examples, such as the use of Celtic (strath, glen, byrne), Anglo-Saxon
(dale, mere, vale, −tun, grange, −ham), Scandinavian (kirk, wald, wick, −
by), Norman French (Richmond), or Irish (bally, dun, drum, clon). Thus,
run names, such as ‘Carngham’, ‘Ingleby’, ‘Darlington’, ‘Pullemere’,
‘Grange Burn’, ‘Greenvale’, ‘Springbyrne’, ‘Richmond Hill’, recalled the
squatters’ British or Irish heritage, and often attached Aboriginal-derived
prefixes or suffixes to titles.
Run name selection remained the squatters’ prerogative. The first

squatter might designate a name, but subsequent run holders could
rename the run at their discretion. As an example, ‘Tarndwarncoort’ was
first known as ‘Korongeeballoort’, or ‘Kerangeballort’, but was changed
to the former on the advice of the local Aboriginals when the homestead
was rebuilt at another location. The motivation was the squatters:
The name [applied to the run] was allotted by Charles [Burchett] who said
that as in the old country places were ‘The Oakes’, ‘The Ashes’, ‘The Beeches’, and
so on, he thought it most befitting that an Australian homestead should be
known as ‘The Gums’.
For all the choices, the preference was strongly towards an Australian-
styled appellation or Aboriginal-derived names (43% of total runs in the
six Counties). The second preference (17%) was for celebratory generic
appellations. Third preference appellations recalled personalities (10%)
or used names previously designated by Mitchell (10%).
* * *
Survey and acquisition of land instigated the fencing and enclosure of

landscape into paddocks. Small compartments of landscape, they quickly
acquired names to identify each from other paddocks on a station. Like
Aboriginals giving meanings and names to points in the landscape, the
colonials readily allocated appellations to these newly defined portions of
the landscape. Paddocks today, on most stations, bear the heritage of
names adopted during this phase that recall particular functions, person-
alities, or botanical and faunal aspects of the landscape.
Paddock names denoting functional purposes are in the majority. The
second largest group of paddock names recall personalities associated with
the run, or station, or the landscape. The remaining types of paddock
names, in the minority, recall animals and flora of the landscape. Only a
few paddocks appear to have retained Aboriginal appellations in contrast
to the marked prevalence of Aboriginal-derived run and parish names.
* * *
170 D. S. Jones
Concluding the report of his travels through ‘Australia Felix’, Thomas

Mitchell remarked:
This territory, still for the most part in a state of nature, presents a fair blank
sheet, for any geographical arrangement, whether of country divisions—lines of
communication—or sites of towns, &c. &c.
In prophesying the colonial invasion, he had already laid the nomen-

clature structure of the canvas. In designating first prominent rivers and
hills in his passage, with appellations more often from Aboriginal etymol-
ogy, secondly after old comrades or landmarks from the Peninsular War,
and thirdly after geographical likenesses or prominent individuals in
England and Scotland, he established an identification pattern that per-
petuated past 1900. The allocation of place names, using Aboriginal-
derived etymology, accorded with Colonial surveying policy, but also
intrigued squatters when locating the spaces upon which they were
settling:
As we have taken the country from the natives—land, rivers, mountains, lakes,
and all—surely we ought to take the names also.
In many instances, Aboriginal etymology was adopted. Nomenclatures

of a descriptive, commemorative, or recollective nature of landscapes of
home were also applied for place names or for geographical features.
Aboriginal appellations were subsumed as part of the colonial invasion.
They were reapplied correctly or mistakenly to locate spaces in the land-
scape and were embraced in run names to designate a tract, or a squatters
‘estate’, in the landscape. As part of this domination, a cartographic
generic term or suffix was always added to identify the feature to which it
referred contrary to Aboriginal practice. Where a generic Aboriginal term
was appended, it was not one which a cartographer or surveyor normally
applied, or could orthographically translate or record. The substance and
meaning of the ‘place’ or ‘locality’ term was even more amorphous due to
problematic linguistic and phonetic translations.
Descriptive names were largely linked to the squatting occupation and
denoted perceptions, associative infrastructure, or characteristics of the
site or feature. These names became applied after a period of squatting to

activities or locational referents from the occupation rather than as a
result of exploration or run search. Subsequent surveying activities only
copied the adopted or referent appellations pre-empting their ‘approval’
and proclamation in bureaucratic offices many kilometres away.
Changes in appellations between 1830 and 1870 in the colony display
a marked affinity with an original occupier or elements of civic identity
and pride. The majority of re-namings were from non-Aboriginal to non-
Aboriginal appellations (51%), with Aboriginal to non-Aboriginal (14%)
and non-Aboriginal to Aboriginal (27%) being a lesser pattern. Still,
some 46% of place names in the colony remained with Aboriginal derived
appellations compared to 56% non-Aboriginal appellations. Alterations
in names were common amongst non-Aboriginal derived appellations in
the District illustrating an emphasis upon changing vernacular place
names to more formal names echoing townships or personalities in
England or Scotland.
A more detailed assessment of place and geographical feature per county
is possible by two sets of criteria. One set provides ten categories for place
names: Descriptive, Associative, Incident, Possessive, Commemorative,
Folk-etymologies (i.e. Aboriginal-derived), Manufactured, Mistake, and
Shift names; or, the set applied previously in this section of: Aboriginal-
derived, Personality-based, Scottish-derived, English-derived, Gaelic-
derived, Generic, Mitchell-derived designations, or Other.
The results indicate a high propensity for Aboriginal etymologies
throughout the District. Aboriginal place names predominate in the
Counties of Dundas (55%), Grenville (38%), Hampden (52%),
Normanby (44%), Ripon (43%), and Villiers (39%). Commemorative
names follow with 33%, 36%, 38%, 38%, 22%, 30%, and 33%, respec-
tively. In the second set, Aboriginal nomenclature again predominates
with 58%, 40%, 52%, 44%, 40%, 39%, and 45%, respectively. Peaks
also occur in personality appellations, in Normanby (17%), Ripon
(24%), and Villiers (15%), and in English-derived appellations, in
Grenville (16%), Hampden (21%), and Normanby (17%).
Names of natural features fared worst in their adherence to Aboriginal
etymologies. Instead, appellations favoured commemorating a personal-
ity directly or indirectly related to the squatting occupation of the
172 D. S. Jones
District, or Australia, or carried appellations proclaimed by Mitchell dur-

ing his 1836 explorations of Australia Felix. This predominance prompted
one traveller to ask of
Taylor’s river [Mt Emu Creek]. I do not know to whom this stream is indebted
for its English name, but it was surely the height of bad taste to substitute such
a common-place designation, for whomsoever it may have been given, for the
beautiful aboriginal name which the stream has doubtless borne for time
immemorial.
Using the two sets of criteria, the distribution pattern when applied to
a catalogue of natural feature appellations for rivers, creeks, hills, moun-
tains, swamps, lakes, lagoons, and points in the District is scattered, but
still shows a marked preference to personality-based etymologies.
Aboriginal etymologies are 10% in Dundas, 42% in Grenville, 49% in
Hampden, 8% in Normanby, 19% in Ripon, and 11% in Villiers, com-
pared to personality-based names of 40%, 26%, 18%, 44%, 25%, and
31%, respectively. Geographical features that carry names allocated by
Mitchell are more numerous in Dundas (30%) and Normanby (15%),
and generic names are more frequent in Hampden (19%), Ripon (23%),
and Villiers (20%).
Three main traits arise from nomenclature use in this phase. First, use
of Aboriginal etymologies for place and geographical feature names was
strongly heightened by bureaucratic policies towards their adoption, and
local squatter interest in the re-application of indigenous nomenclature.
Second, the phase witnessed a major transition in selecting place names
for hamlets or townships, but more often only non-Aboriginal-derived
appellations changed. Third, no transition is evident for natural features
that predominantly carry non-Aboriginal-derived appellations.
* * *
A tension between resemblance and difference denoted plant and animal

nomenclature in the District. In many instances, conflicts between old
world recollections and recognition of the new provoked appellations
well qualified before their application, borrowed from Aboriginal
languages (especially the Port Jackson Dharuk language), adapted from

descriptive names, or adoptions of scientific names applied in a generic
fashion.
These characteristics produced an amalgam of vernacular labels that
relied upon resemblance, colour, scientific terminology, or Aboriginal
etymology in qualifying the species, until a maturation in scientific
nomenclature standardised terminologies occurred after the 1860s.
Mitchell spoke of woods ‘of eucalyptus and mimosa, growing there as on
the open forest land’, slopes of Gariwerd covered in ‘banksia, the casua-
rina, and the hardy xanthorhæa’, new species of Pultenaea ‘allied to
Pultenæa stipularis*’, or open downs threaded by lines ‘of “yarra” gum
trees, or the white bark eucalyptus’. A lieutenant on this journey, in con-
trast, wrote of ‘Blue Gum, Stringybark and Bastard Mahogany, … This,
with the grass!’, or ‘Thin rank grass and a few blue gums apparently about
100 years growth in the hollow’. Another traveller, in 1841–1843,
observed ‘a thick forest of stunted gum, stringy bark and an abundance of
lightwood, cherry tree were also numerous’, the ‘young grass, anchistiria’,
or plains ‘of the eucalyptus stringy bark gum with banksia, oak, and
cherry tree. The Xanthrasia was also met with’. Near Mt Rouse was ‘dwarf
Banksia for 10 miles [16.1 km]. The other 15 miles [24.1 km] is stinted
[sic] gum and Banksia and near to Cox [at “Weerangourt”] is blacks and
stunted gums’. In the rivers were ‘serpents, plenty “fish”’, and on the
plains ‘I saw 4 emus large, plenty kangaroo … 2 places where N [atives]
had caught parrots’, and ‘numerous turkeys’. But confusion also reigned
in the use of names:
Almost the only wood seen on these plains is what is called lightwood, or black-
wood … The trees that are thinly scattered over these delightful tracts are chiefly
the graceful lightwood … The botanical name of this beautiful tree is ‘Exocarpus
Cupressiformis’.
A later traveller told of ‘Hop scrub’ in the Stony Rises, an ‘enormous

number of Kangaroos’ and ‘other varmint which trouble the settler beside
the kangaroos and fruit-eating opossums. Eagle-hawks and wild dogs are
very mischievous’. Water bodies abounded ‘with Black Swans, &c. The
Native Hen … Emus … Platypus … [and] Upon one dead tree by the
[Terang] lake I counted one hundred and ten white Cockatoos’.
174 D. S. Jones
The tension in nomenclature was evident in the District just as much

as in other newly ‘settled’ areas. ‘Woods’ was replaced by ‘bush’ as a
generic term for the landscape beyond ‘settled’ ‘locations’. Bush was bro-
ken into ‘brush’ and ‘scrub’. ‘Forest’ was redefined by its primacy in
affording grazing pastures as ‘open forest’ or ‘thick forest’, and ‘plains’ was
applied to any flat to undulating landscape with or without trees. Thus,
‘open forests’, ‘grasslands’, or ‘open plains’ encapsulated the best ‘sheep
walks’ for the ‘squatter’.
Lexical innovations diffused across the landscape to describe in ver-
nacular its mysteries, its new functions, and new names for species of
flora and fauna.
5.2 Swagmen to the Skies

ROAD TO LAKE COLAC—The District Surveyor, Mr. Skene, has been
employed during the last fortnight in laying off the road from Geelong to Lake
Colac, a task he has accomplished in a more perfect manner than has been the
case with any other road of the same length in Port Phillip. The whole of the
distance—47 miles 57 chains [87.l km], being accurately measured, and mile-
stones, or rather mile-posts erected throughout the whole, with pegs every ten
chains [2.0 km].
Geelong Advertiser, November 11, 1844
* * *
Colonial wanderers feared a lonely death in the bush. The idea haunts
thought and prose, and draws upon a ‘dichotomy of courage and desola-
tion’. This is encapsulated in the remarkable literary ballad of ‘The Sick
Stockrider’: the fusion of the experiential landscape into a dramatic
monologue. Providence deeply underpinned its central metaphor of jour-
ney, mirroring the pathway of life—the journey.
Pathways in this phase were not defined by kilometre posts, nor
enclosed by fences, not constrained by time; it was if Aboriginal sense of
time transcended any physical arrangement of way or passage. One just
travelled and the landscape became a personal allegory of colonial life. In
doing so, thoughts became ‘animated’ in a pastoral-elegiac sense, lacing

the journey with voices relative to the landscape.
Figures 5.2 and 5.3 depict the places and ‘roads’ and the Routes of
Travellers, respectively, mentioned in this section.
This section examines the role of pathways in colonial senses. The
motivation, the implicit grim fear of traversing the unfamiliar landscape,
the ways available to move about, and some timely insights by voyagers in
the ‘wilderness’ are explicit in the colonial explorations taken through
this landscape. From these movements evolved the tradition of a ‘nomad
tribe … of pastoral labourers’. Embodied in the ‘swagman’ and bush
mateship mythology, it evoked the walkabout sensibilities of the Dreaming
where the landscape held no boundaries only the unknowns, unquantifi-
able spirits, unspoken rituals, incantations of ‘oral bush literature’, and a
relaxed resignation to life. ‘To wander as we’ve wandered many a mile,
/ … All through the hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride’.
* * *
The unfenced landscape was a moving grassed sea to the voyageur.

Purposeful exploratory and unconscious contemplative thoughts per-
vaded a journey, the motivation of which was guided by destiny.
In the depths of darkness, near Kolora, James Bonwick came across a
warm ‘blazing fire’, and mateship ‘disguised beneath an unlikely exterior’.
A bush yarn unfolded, told in an allegorical journey; futility and heroism
waxed with isolation and mateship in a parable that told of the landscape
and unlocked secrets controlling human life.
There was a need to explore and a need to learn. Squatters set off in
different directions in search of sheepwalks. But others were in search of
knowledge. Bonwick’s official journey was to assess schools throughout
the District in the late 1850s, but in reality was to satisfy ‘his insatiable
thirst for knowledge’. Lang sought to improve his comprehension of his
distant political constituency, but was driven by a desire to unlock the
landscape for selection, trade, and free immigration. Mitchell was
entranced by those ‘verdant plains’ and in his role as being ‘the harbinger
of mighty changes’ that they overtook his instructions, permitting his
176
D. S. Jones
Fig. 5.2 Places and roads

Fig. 5.3 Routes of travellers

178 D. S. Jones
Humboldtian sensibilities to structure his journey and his pastoral elegy

about Australia Felix (1838). George Robinson was sent out on a bureau-
cratic agenda to make a
complete census … of the aboriginal population, distinguishing the number of

each family, with the age, name, sex, as also the tribe to which they belong; the
principal persons of each tribe, whether warrior, counsellor, elder, or otherwise;
also the boundaries and aboriginal names of districts occupied by each tribe, the
aboriginal names of mountains, lakes, rivers, and other localities; the difference
of language, customs, and habits of each tribe, with their political relation,
whether of amity or hostility
but shed a sympathetic tear as a culture, a relationship, and a landscape

were torn apart and left to decay in front of his eyes. Henry Kingsley,
‘Rolf Boldrewood’, and Adam Lindsay Gordon, as scholars also sought
refuge in boyish landscapes, far from the crenellated battlements and tra-
ditions of English pastures, only to find themselves reminiscing and mus-
ing about allegiances to their adopted or birth-right landscapes.
Out of these, and other sensibilities came the nurtured yarns, bush
ballads, and mythology of the wanderer. It represented a tradition deeply
dependent upon the landscape—its topography, seasons, mystique, and
unexplained happenings—that moulded attitudes to and shaped the pas-
toral ascendancy over the landscape. Even in the late 1870s, one could
witness the
children of the [Mortlake] school collecting around their campfires at the old
quarry and listening with their eyes and ears wide open to the stories of the
teamsters’ trips over the Bolac Plains into the outside world as it was then, to
those children, with each of them looking forward to the day when they would
be big enough to start out to have a look at this ‘wonderland.’ At that time it
was the Never-Never country to them.
* * *
In this phase, pathways existed as a series of experiences and incidents. Its

fords and bridges, markers and signposts, its abominable conditions or
sense of ill-defined passage, or its caricature as a ‘Road’, held newly con-

trived traces upon the landscape. Here were newly fashioned songlines,
phantasmagorical representations, and signposts.
A ‘road’ was a skein of rutted tracks wandering aimlessly around rocks,
stumps, and through boggy patches. Lesser tracks, from homesteads, met
these roads, and recognisable tracks of saddle horses wound through the
grasses between stations, outstations, and villages like desire lines. In
summer, the apparition of a dust cloud marked the passage of a traveller
on a distant ‘road’, the thunder cracks of whips heralded bullock trains,
and the bleatings of sheep forewarned of a drove. To the winter traveller,
The roads were knee-deep in mud, the creeks full, the nights long and cold.
However, grass was plentiful, and
‘Little cared we for wind or weather,
When Youth and I lived ‘there’ together.’
so away. ‘Vogue la galér’ [… across the plains].
This scene was constantly retold in stories about the trials of journeys.
‘Dust, dust, dust’ or ‘wets, mud, and mire’ were typical summer and win-
ter road surfaces. This monotony was only disrupted by creek fords,
lonely inns, vernacular stockyards, and clumps of trees in the ‘barren and
uninteresting … trackless ocean’.
Passage through the Stony Rises involved the ‘most dreadful road you
can possibly imagine … all the way like the bed of a dry creek’. But
‘roads’ on the plains were equally wanting: ‘bush tracks are very puzzling
and in some places almost invisible … you hardly see more than a sheep-
walk’. ‘A beastly domination of filth and mud’ dogged the traveller, ‘knee-
deep … in pure mud’ one negotiated a winter track through ‘impassable
seas of mud’, and, stations were ‘130 miles [209.2 km] in the Wilderness
without road or communication’ for the most part of this phase. Indeed,
in summer ‘the ground both in front of the carriage, and on either side
appeared to be a vast lake or inland sea through which there was no trace
of a road, as far as I could see, in any direction’.
Descriptions of roads throughout this phase told of daunting seas to
wade through or tempests of dust to negotiate. They were ‘very rough’ or
‘extremely soft’ in the 1840s, ‘fearfully bad’ but ‘rather romantic’ in the
180 D. S. Jones
late 1860s, or ‘impassable in winter’ due to ‘very deep wheel ruts’. In other
seasons they were more reliable, but were ‘tortuous’ in sections through
swamps, rivers, and forest swaths. Deep ruts and wandering tracks fol-
lowed bullock routes, and swaths of browsed grasses denoted major stock
routes. Mud quagmires or swamps did not impede bullock passages. They
only encased the hooves and wheels in mud and seed. The air was
rent with the thunderous diapason of … hoarse blasphemy, with the deep-
toned, sullen thud of the whips, or with the cursing, encouraging, entreating.
[One witnessed a] … chaos of hurtling horns and staring eye-balls, of slaver-
ing mouths and low-bent scrawny necks. [On hill climbs there was] … a
vision of blood, and a sound of demoniac oaths. A crash of commingled whips,
bullocks, yokes, chains … a long, deep, ominous, rolling explosion, one deadly
roar of culminating and murderous profanity and, at last the crest of the hill
is gained.
Drove routes were supposed to be kept to less than a kilometre along

‘roads’—the infamous ‘empty space’—fenced or unfenced, but were
often greatly abused as folk verse celebrates:
But this is the law which the drovers make, right easily understood,
They travel their stage where the grass is bad, but they camp where the grass
is good;
They camp, and they ravage the squatter’s grass till never a blade remains;
Then they drift away as the white clouds drift on the edge of the salt-
bush plains.
Such practices prompted the erection of strong boundary fences along

3 0 m [100 yards] wide stock routes, or along the surveyed and invisible
‘Government Roads’. Major tracks became synonymous journey routes
across the landscape, traversing numerous runs, and acquiring the gran-
deur of the appellation ‘Road’.
The ‘Great Western Road’ stretched westward from Fyansford past
Frenchman’s Inn [Cressy], over the bullocky’s ‘Boomerang Ridge’ on
‘Titanga’, and across the plains to The Grange [Hamilton]. Originally
called ‘Wedge’s Road’ in the 1840s, it was a monotonous but ‘well-beaten
road’, or stock ‘track’, providing the main route into the District from
Geelong for all goods and supplies.
The ‘Portland Bay Road’ stretched from Geelong to Portland through

the Stony Rises by Camperdown and along the coastline from
Warrnambool. But the ‘new Portland Bay road “Tyers” [“Road”]’ from
Portland up to The Grange, that replaced the ‘old road’ by Digby, was
more important in this phase. A ‘good road’ in the 1840s, it had bridges
across the Second and First Rivers to alleviate their ‘scarcely passable
[“glue-pots”] in winter’, and inns to service travellers. Nonetheless, it was
a ‘narrow road deep in mud and abounding in ruts, rocks and stone’, and
‘consequently very heavy’ after rains.
Westward from The Grange junction stretched the ‘Adelaide Road’.
Descending along the Grange Burn, it paralleled the Wannon though the
‘only indication of [it was] … a few dray tracks’. It was the main stock
route from Port Phillip to Adelaide and the Chinese trail from Guichen
Bay to the diggings during the 1850s.
The ‘Major’s Line’, the legacy of the environmental carnage of several
bullock carriages as a part of the ‘discovery’ of Australia Felix in 1836, was
still discernible in the 1840s. The outward route was transformed into a
‘regular highway’ in the 1840s and 1850s as numerous sheep droves fol-
lowed its alignment from Sydney Town into the plains to The Grange.
The inward track, north from the Wannon, was also used by drays result-
ing in ‘deep ruts’ and the ‘ground [being] cut up’ in many places.
These ‘Roads’ quickly became the mail coach routes and major bullock
cartage ‘roads’. There were, however, numerous other lesser used tracks. A
well-worn trail linked the Ararat diggings to Belfast [Port Fairy] along
Salt Creek or by Mortlake. A major route led up along the Leigh to
Buninyong, and tracks wove through ‘Grassmere’, ‘Lake Bolac’, and
‘Glenormiston’ runs, all serving the many drays, bullocks, diggers, inns,
and facilitating inter-station journeys. As ‘roads’ became regular ‘high-
ways’, they were surveyed, enclosed by fences, and marked by timber mile
posts, stones, or cast iron posts.
* * *
In August and September 1836, Major Thomas Mitchell first traversed a

landscape, ‘Open and available in its present state, for all purposes of civi-
lized man’. His insights were extensively detailed in picturesque prose
182 D. S. Jones
later in Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia (1838).

Tracks were created by carts and boat-carriages as his large party traversed
rivers, streams, and soft soils over ‘finely varied hills or … equally roman-
tic vales’. His first views of the Wannon Valley were recorded in glowing
picturesque tones:
I perceived before me a ridge in bluey distance … on reaching a brow of high

land, what a noble prospect appeared! a river winding amongst meadows, that
were fully a mile broad, and green as an emerald. Above them rose swelling hills
of fantastic shapes, but all smooth and thickly covered with rich verdure.
The panorama was, however, slow to reach because the carriages were
constantly bogged in the gluepots of the ‘Red Gum Country’. The ‘sur-
face under the pressure of the cattle was immediately converted into
white and liquid mud’ requiring block and tackle and the felling of tim-
ber to construct fords, to reach the ‘open grass country’. Once in the
Valley, however, the ‘vehicles trundled’ easily across the vales. The ease of
passage deteriorated as they followed the Glenelg southward and then
through the thick Myamyn forests. Travel past Condah was hampered by
the ‘various swamps or boggy soft hollows’, and the ‘rough sharp-pointed
fragments of rock’, in the stony rises.
The vista from Mt Napier, eastwards, promised ‘an extensive tract of
open grassy land’ stretching into a haze. This land was only reached after
traversing more swampy streams resulting in loss of bullocks: ‘One was
suffocated in the mud, and the other having lain down in it, could not be
made to rise’.
Entering upon the plains, ‘a finer country could scarcely be imagined’
and the vehicles continued ‘without difficulty’. ‘The cart-wheels trundled
merrily along’, halting below Mt Abrupt to enable the ‘tourists’ to climb
the eminence and experience ‘a truly sublime scene’. Beyond were the
‘blue and purple’ peaks of Gariwerd melting into the distant skyline, and
outward a ‘vast extent of open downs’ that stretched to the Pyrenees.
Advancing ‘we again found the ground so soft and boggy’ causing a
lengthy encampment at Lake Repose to rest both the party and bullocks.
The outward journey, thereafter, was much easier and a ‘line’ stretched
from Lake Repose through the Pyrenees to the upper Campaspe, from
the tracks of the ‘heavy wheel-carriages and worn-out cattle’, that were
still discernible in the early 1840s.
This journey resulted in the spatial entity of ‘Australia Felix’—an inspi-
rational landscape that would create
a lasting monument of the beneficial influence of British power and coloniza-

tion, thus to engraft a new and flourishing state, on a region now so desolate
and unproductive; but this seems only possible under very extensive arrange-
ments, and by such means as England alone can supply:-
“Here the great mistress of the seas is known,
By empires founded,—not by states o’erthrown.”
Sydney Gazette, Jan. 1, 1831
Between March and August 1841, George Augustus Robinson made an

extensive and well-documented journey through the landscape as chief
protector of Aborigines of Port Phillip (1839–1849). His instructions were
to establish a friendly communication with the strange tribes, and to furnish

general information with reference to the Aboriginal natives in that quarter …
country we rode over was a plain with trees thinly scattered, small honeysuckle
and gun [sic], eucalyptus … [and a] Road level but soft and heavy in wet
weather. Travelling in Australia Felix … [was easy]. The light spring van
attached to the expedition answered admirably. Vehicles of this character are
well suited for travelling in this country and nothing I am sure but prejudice
prevent their more general usefulness.
John Dunmore Lang undertook a tour of the District in January–

February 1846. Part of his colonial political constituency, the tour
enabled a familiarisation of the sentiment and landscape ‘development’ in
progress, later to be reported in Phillipsland (1847). The journey from
Geelong, by horse until ‘Lake Bolac’, met with ‘a land not inhabited’:
in every direction, the country was perfectly clear of every obstruction, and the
horseman could gallop fearlessly along wherever he pleased—no turnpike gates
in the way, no four-rail fences, no hedges or ditches, no indications of the pres-
ence of man in any direction, except, perhaps, where a flock of fine-woolled
sheep were cropping the rich herbage under the charge of a solitary shepherd
and his dog, or a herd of sleek cattle browzing in the distance.
184 D. S. Jones
Henry Kingsley’s travels through the District between 1854 and 1857
sketched an adventurous plot retold in The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn
(1859). Though drawing more upon the Kiewa and Snowy River Valleys,
Croajingolong scenery, and oral literature, it has many passages that recall
of sojourns at ‘Squattlesea Mere’ and ‘Langi Willi’, his visits to ‘Dunmore’,
‘Carngham’, ‘Nerrin Nerrin’, and possibly visits to ‘Gorrinn’ and ‘Mount
William’.
In the winter of 1857, James Bonwick, Colonial Inspector of
Denominational Schools, travelled through the District on an official
assessment of educational opportunities and facilities. The Narrative of an
Educational Tour (1858), of this lone arduous horse-back journey, pro-
vides invaluable insights into the transitional phase of the District from
an unfenced ‘wilderness’ landscape into one possessing many symbols of
Western civilisation. Passing Tower Hill and Belfast to Portland, he noted
a region of swamps, heartless forest, barren wastes, heathy scrub, lifeless des-
erts … [where] Now and then a small oasis would gratify the traveller with its
real grass, its Blackwood, Cherry [Ballart] and She Oak, when the limestone
could shake off the sand, clay or gravel.
Arriving in Casterton, he made a deviation to Mount Gambier,

through ‘heavy sands and then through water and mud … upon the
Chinese track’, before going through the Wannon Valley, ‘a scene of tran-
quility and richness, that I felt as if transported to the gates of
Paradise of Peris … My jaded beast employed my moments of reverie in
very philosophical and sensible nibblings of the grass before him’.
5.3 Campfires on the Plains

The short period of our stay at this station, was peculiarly agreeable, especially
when a ‘pot of tea’—the universal and universally-accepted beverage of the
bush … was made for us.
John Dunmore Lang, Phillipsland, 1847
* * *
To the lonely shepherd camping beneath the Southern Cross, the land-
scape was one large void. A minute speck in the greater composition of
things, encompassed by strange noises, the constant ‘lowing’ or ‘roaring’
of sheep and cattle, and a sense of isolation. Warmed only by flickering
flames in a campfire, and the reassurance that the Cross would not disap-
pear, a traveller rested musing the scene:
The Southern Cross was at first erect, and in its natural position as a symbol; …
I gathered comfort in the thought that other travellers in other lands were gaz-
ing then upon its triumphant glory, and faith assured me that in a little while
I should see it again in all its gorgeous perfections … The Cross once exhibited
to the admiring eye of man never disappears. When that eye is closed to all ter-
restrial objects, we shall still admire the cross, though upon another, an eter-
nal, shore.
Here was a symbol of thought, deity, and culture. Crackling embers

and wispy mists reached upwards to that symbol in the dark landscape.
Centres of human community, between 1830 and 1870, shifted to
purposeful locations in the landscape. In many ways, the functional pur-
pose of gathering points repeated the continuum before 1830: homestead
centres were constructed, often around favoured Aboriginal ‘village’ sites
or ancient springs; hamlets developed around fords, often near significant
waterholes; natural features in the landscape became landmarks or direc-
tional beacons, gathering mythical status by incorporation into bush sto-
ries; and places of death were immortalised in ritual, monument, and
nomenclature. Landmarks continued their pre-colonial purpose, but a
new set of myths, stories, social structures, and rituals, were cast upon the
landscape like a new lace table-cloth on an ancient dining table.
Eminences and places on the ‘blank canvas’ were replaced by a newly
constructed set of notions and patterns. Structures in the landscape func-
tionally remained the same, and centres or points (cultural, spiritual,
daily living routines) continued their explicit and implicit roles. This sec-
tion examines these points of community, which shaped colonial social
and resource gathering activities. Their roles fostered an alternative set of
myths, structures, and ‘villages’ in similar locations, or around similar
186
D. S. Jones
Fig. 5.4 Places in the landscape

features, to those established by Aboriginals. Landscape tracery contin-

ued to influence site selection activity points but their locations were
often analogous to those sites previously occupied by Aboriginals.
* * *
There is an Australian bush ethic that was inspired by the sense of isola-
tion within the landscape. It induces hospitality and ‘mateship’, whether
around a campfire or at a colonial homestead: the ‘friendly wilderness’. A
tired visitor could chance upon a homestead’s evening shine, open the
door, and stand entranced.
No one was in the room, but the tea things were set out and the candles burn-
ing, so I stood with my hands on the latch of the door gazing at the cozy scene
for some moments.
Hospitality was a reignited British tradition, whether at the campfire

or at the homestead. ‘Most people travelling … [in the landscape] gener-
ally carry a blanket [or a kangaroo rug] with them in which they roll
themselves in a corner of the hut’, or to wrap around themselves at camp-
fires. The ubiquitous ‘swag’ became the essential home or possession, and
shelter from the dark roof was obtained by tree canopies or a ‘coarse erec-
tion of sticks’. And if one was ‘Bushed for the night’, and came upon a
blazing fire, there was always a pannican of tea, hospitality, and stories:
Though supper was over, my hospitable host extended towards me the pannican
of tea, a couple of potatoes, and a pice [sic] of boiled beef, apologizing for the
want of bread, regretting my loss of the track, and proffering the share of his
blanket for the night's repose. I cordially accepted the supper, but courteously
declined the coverlid … Altogether I was much pleased with the yarn of my
shepherd friend, and, when he rolled into his blanket, I felt in better spirits to
face my night in the Bush.
Friendship was proffered although it could be a ‘pretty heavy tax on

some of those who have their stations bordering on the principal tracks
from the interior to the townships’. A recently arrived group of colonials
travelling to ‘Trawalla’ found, in 1839, ‘quartering for the night’ at
188 D. S. Jones
‘Native Hut No. 2’, entertainment at ‘Golf Hill’, comfort at Winter’s

Flat, and a ‘gentlemen kindly gave up their sleeping apartment to me’ at
‘Ballaarat’. Tea was the common bond—‘in many huts the tea-pot is
always at the fire; and if a stranger came in, the first thing he does is to
help himself to a panikin [sic] of tea’—becoming a euphemism for
‘refreshments’. To an overlander in 1839, in the ‘midst of the wilder-
ness … [“Merino Downs”] presented such a sweet retreat. The circum-
stance of meeting in the wilderness with this fairylike habitation … had
taken me quite aback, and I felt ‘de trop’ in such a place’.
Candles, furnishings, a sofa and piano, and a ‘cordial reception’ greeted
the traveller at ‘Purrumbete’; ‘a good library’ and a ‘very hospitable’ host
resided at ‘Merrang’ tea, blankets, and a meal were regularly proffered at
‘Trawalla’, ‘solid reading [and] intellectual discussions’ were common at
‘Dunmore’ and ‘Squattlesea Mere’; ‘Langi Willi’ maintained a ‘well
selected library’ providing an ideal stimulus for any Australian ‘artist who
first worthily illustrated her free forest life, her adventurous sons and
daughters fair’; and a Scottish-style ‘cordial welcome’ with ‘refreshments’
was always available at ‘Glenormiston’. Rarely was one turned down at
homesteads, but outstations were often a different situation.
* * *
The alternative to such hospitality was always the ‘most dreadful abomi-
nation’ of a shelter—the inn. At crossings, fords, or fresh water springs,
the characteristic inn was the first commercial building constructed, an
outpost of ‘civilisation’, to cater for travellers, bullockies, shepherds, and
stockmen. And around this pivot was erected a scatter of rough ‘wooden
erections painted white … and several brownish things scattered here and
there’ comprising houses, stores, sheds, and blacksmiths’ and carpenters’
shops, like a cluster of Winter encampment Aboriginal structures around
a central meeting space. Though there was ‘nothing like what you would
call a street in it’, and each township had its own character and setting,
their roles were the same: permanent cultural repositories of trade, arti-
fice, communication, and ritual.
The hamlet of Timboon [Camperdown], in 1846, grew from an out-
station of ‘Purrumbete’ with the erection of a ‘respectable Bush Inn’ and
a series of cottages. By 1857, the Inn had deteriorated into a ‘rude-edifice’,

and the hamlet provided home for some 300 residents in a surveyed vil-
lage with ‘a good name in the interior for virtue, industry, and prosperity’.
In the plains beyond Mt Noorat, where only stations occupied the
landscape, the lowly Presbyterian manse of Kilnoorat was erected in 1847
as a point for regional deity diffusion and influence. Further northwards
Mount Shadwell [Mortlake] was evolving in the early 1840s from the
‘Mount Shadwell’ station with its vernacular cottages, shop, and wool-
shed, to a more substantive settlement on the major westward travel route
in the late 1840s. By 1850, it was a major centre of agriculture, deity, and
exchange. Much of the station had been subsumed by wheat farms sup-
porting 50 families, a flour mill, ‘an ancient Bush Inn’ that substituted for
Anglican and Presbyterian cathedrals, and a scatter of timber or wattle-
and-daub houses and cottages all on a township survey reserve.
In the 1840s, The Woolshed [Hexham] and Caramut were but ‘bark
hut’ outstations to local stations on fords of the Hopkins River and
Muston’s Creek. A woolshed, a shop, and an inn had been erected at The
Woolshed by 1844. The latter was replaced by a larger bluestone edifice
in 1854. Both located on the ‘Portland Bay Road’ between Mount
Shadwell and The Grange [Hamilton], they developed into small hamlets
of four to five tenements each in the 1850s. The Police Bench and Post
and Telegraph Office were also established at Hexham in the late 1850s.
‘Mount Rouse’ station was resumed for the Mount Rouse Protectorate
Station in the 1840s whereupon a farm and Aboriginal mission were
established. A large stone thatched hut, a collection of Aboriginal shel-
ters, and a 7.3 ha paddock of vegetables and wheat greeted a visitor to the
Station in 1842. In the 1850s, the station was disbanded and resurveyed
for the ‘Kolor’ station, and Penshurst township. The latter, by 1857, com-
prised a ‘thriving township’ of stone and timber cottages and stores, serv-
ing the pastoral and farming settlements around the Mount.
Further north, at the junction of the ‘Adelaide’ and ‘Portland Bay
Roads’ in 1841, ‘The Grange’ station consisted of a series of huts on a
‘pretty little stream’, the Grange Burn. The location had already been
surveyed for a proposed township, and a Police Magistrate was ‘to be
stationed at this … place’. By 1846, the settlement of The Grange was
flourishing on the surveyed knoll, and ‘a comfortable and well-constructed
190 D. S. Jones
house of entertainment’, the ‘Grange Inn’, greeted travellers and mail-

carriages on the ‘Roads’. By 1857, Hamilton [The Grange] was ‘one of
the leading places in the colony’ with 700 residents and a collection of
hotels, bakers, butchers, stores, saddlers, shoemakers, watchmakers, a
Post Office and Police Station, some ‘edifices for public worship’, and a
National School. A major focus of exchange, deity, and communication
in the District, the Town was erected on a site previously marked only by
the Grange Burn and a series of lava caves.
In the Wannon Valley, the townships of Coleraine and Casterton in
the late 1840s evolved from crossing places over the Koroite Creek and
Glenelg River on the ‘Adelaide Road’; convergence points of dray tracks
to uphill stations, and outstation sites for ‘Sandford’ and ‘Mount Koroite’.
By 1857, Casterton contained a ‘score of dwellings, including two stores,
and Chaffey’s Hotel’, a police station, and a ‘really pretty schoolroom’.
The erection of the roadside inn confirmed the development of Casterton
township to service travellers and the surrounding prosperous ‘Sandford’,
‘Muntham’, ‘Merino Downs’, and ‘Kout Norein’ stations. Coleraine
‘consisted of twenty-five houses’, the roadside Koroite Inn, and a school-
room serving several farms and stations in the Konong Creek catchment
including ‘Mount Koroite’.
South of Mt Napier, the three unsurveyed townships of Macarthur,
Hawkesdale, and Woolsthorpe were only hamlets in the late 1840s.
Positioned at fords on the Eumeralla, Moyne, and Merri (‘Spring Creek’)
Rivers, they served ‘Eumeralla’, ‘Kangatong’, and ‘The Union’ stations,
and travellers, with their roadside inns. By 1857, they comprised hamlets
of some 30–40 residents each, located on roads to the Ararat gold dig-
gings or to Hamilton. In the extensive crop farms, and ‘fine clearings’
north of Tower Hill, the site of Koroit was awaiting a settlement.
The ‘Portland-Bunninyong Road [sic]’, on the open plains in the early
1840s, was a long trail of dray and bullock tracks created by bullockys,
travellers, and droving groups. The future townships of Dunkeld,
Wickliffe, Lake Bolac, Streatham, and Skipton were only fords on the
‘Mount Sturgeon’, ‘Narrapumelap’, ‘Lake Bolac’, ‘Fiery Creek’, and
‘Bamgamie’ stations. Skipton provided the turn-off for the ‘Mt William
road’ from Geelong, though one had to ford a ‘stream … running at a
brisk rate’. Skipton was, however, regularly by-passed in favour of the
more northerly and drier ‘Streatham-Mt Emu Road’ until the discovery
of gold. By 1846, the road was well-travelled and a chain of inns served
travellers. One could change horses at ‘Mount Sturgeon’, breakfast at an
inn on the Hopkins crossing, pick up passengers at the ‘comfortable cot-
tage’ of ‘Lake Bolac’, and rattle over Fiery Creek onwards for an overnight
stay at ‘Gregory’s Inn’ on Mt Emu Creek.
This route quickly became the main road to the Ballaarat diggings and
connected to the Chinese track from Guichen Bay. ‘Dunkeld township
contained six houses, besides a couple of hotels … [and] a substantial and
commodious National School’; Wickliffe was only an ‘incipient town-
ship’ five years old, ‘boasting of nine houses, two stores, … a well built
hotel’, a denominational school, a new double bridge across the Hopkins,
and several vernacular ‘Bush huts’; ‘Lake Bolac’ station marked a future
township; and, Streatham was ‘as unsentimental a place as can well be
conceived … The houses were wretched looking places, neither too clean
nor tidy’. Here was an unsumptuous and disagreeable ‘House of
Entertainment’, a doctor, a blacksmiths’ shop, a post office, and a scatter
of houses ‘without a garden wall to shield from the wind’. Skipton, how-
ever, was ‘greatly thriving’ on the diggings road, though it only consisted
of ‘but six houses and six tents in the township proper’ and a brick church
on the outskirts. A bridge spanned Taylor’s River [Mt Emu Creek], and a
hotel and a store, in a ‘large Tent’, graced its edge.
The southern plains route also evolved from a sequence of creek fords,
roadside inns, and a growing scatter of houses and stores. This route was only
established as a result of the difficulty in finding a suitable coach and bullock
route through the Stony Rises. Elephant Bridge [Darlington] started as a
ford, with Davidson’s Inn, until a bluestone and cast iron ‘substantial struc-
ture’ bridge was erected over Taylor’s River in 1849. By 1857, the township,
renamed Darlington, consisted of the Mt Elephant Hotel, a ‘store, a smithy,
and four houses’. A hamlet was formed around the Browns Waterholes
[Lismore] ford near ‘Gala’ and the White Swan hotel served travellers in the
1840s. By 1857, Lismore consisted of a ‘small postal village’ with a scatter of
houses, a store, the Hotel, and a blacksmith’s shop. Further eastward, the
wattle-and-daub ‘Frenchman’s Inn’, or ‘The Golden Fleece’, was erected in
1842 at the Woady Yalloak River crossing on the future site of Cressy.
* * *
192 D. S. Jones
A number of Aboriginal Protectorate Stations were deliberately created as

refuges for Aboriginal clans, and as vehicles for religious and cultural
indoctrination and assimilation. Or, ‘the religious instruction and salva-
tion of those who may be by the gracious providence of God placed
under your care. All other matters are to be viewed as secondary and
subordinate’.
The Reserves were created as provided planned cultural sanctuaries,
and structured village and farming units.
From 1839, the Wesleyan philosophy echoed from a station complex,
on 260 ha of resumed land, called the Buntingdale Mission. An 8.0 km
buffer was also designated between the Mission and any homestead, cre-
ating a Reserve of some 259 km2. In March 1841, Buntingdale consisted
of two ‘slate’ huts, a large slab store, ‘several other buildings, and also a
paddock fenced’ enclosing a good crop of wheat. It was ‘a bustling village’
with Aboriginals cultivating gardens, felling and splitting timber, attempt-
ing to construct housing, and grinding wheat, all under the guarantee of
‘regular rations’.
But the experiment was to be short-lived. By January 1846, the Mission
had a main weatherboard cottage, ‘a small school or chapel, and out-
buildings for the aborigines’, 2000 sheep and 120 head of cattle, and
some 6.0 ha of wheat under cultivation. The grain still had to be threshed
by colonials as Aboriginals constantly varied their transitory encamp-
ments on the banks of the Barwon. In late 1846, Buntingdale closed, a
‘total failure’ of faith indoctrination (yet a profitable venture from its
grazing rents): ‘that more good has not been realised is amongst the
immutable dispensations of a wise and gracious providence, for reasons
that we cannot comprehend’.
The first regional Colonial Aboriginal Protectorate was temporarily
established on ‘Keilambete’, before relocating in February 1842 to
resumed land at ‘Mount Rouse’ to develop the Mt Rouse Aboriginal
Station. Lake Keilambete Camp and the interim Lake Terang Camp were
chosen on whim and convenience, but proved unacceptable in achieving
their objectives and being too close to several established stations. Mt
Rouse was also intended as a permanent and more centrally located ‘asy-
lum … instituted to provide’ for Aboriginal protection and sustenance.
Another Protectorate Reserve was established at Framlingham in 1865,

only to be closed in 1867 due to lack of support. Lake Condah Station
opened in October 1867 with 826.8 ha, mostly containing Whittlebury
Swamp, on the ‘Lake Condah’ run, and 2.1 ha area was further reserved
for an Anglican Mission Station. By 1869, 5.6 ha had
been cleared and fenced in. The stock on the station consists of seven bull-
ocks, one bull, four cows, three steers, one yearling heifer, three calves, and
two hundred and twenty sheep … The buildings are but temporary. They
consist of four huts, in which a few of the blacks reside. The remainder live
in mia-mias. There is a store house and a missionary’s slab hut.
The Mission was laid out around a quadrangle, unusually reminiscent

of an English village green, with six or seven slab- and bark-roofed cot-
tages lined with bags, with a Mission House and store positioned on the
sides. Two adjacent 6.0 ha paddocks of wheat and potatoes were expanded
in late 1870 to 24.2 ha of grazing paddocks containing 1 saddle and 2
heavy horses, 10 cows, 20 heifers, 17 steers, 18 working bullocks, and 20
calves, with an additional 12.1 ha sown with wheat, potatoes, and oats.
In 1870, apart from the central green, there were a Missionary’s Residence,
a detached kitchen, a school room, a school master’s residence, a cart
shed, a harness room, stables, and a new bluestone school house was
under construction.
* * *
Inter-cultural antagonism to the Aboriginal presence on terra nullius

resulted in hostility, fear, and numerous murders during this phase.
Culminating in ‘The Eumeralla War’ (in the Mt Eccles stony rises), it was
foreshadowed by many ill-recorded deaths which only Aboriginals, and
the guilty, remember. These scenes were banished into memories and
bush tales. Without considering all incidents, a number of sites have
become woven into landscape stories and are worthy of mention.
On ‘Wooriwyrite’, a site on Mt Emu Creek was incorporated into
colonial folklore as ‘Murdering Gully’, or ‘Puuroy-uup’. This location,
involving the slaughter of some 35–40 Aboriginals in late 1839, is
recorded in an official deposition:
194 D. S. Jones
As they approached … they formed themselves into an extended line Taylor

being in the centre. They found them [the Aboriginals] asleep and immediately
fired upon them and killed the whole party save one consisting of thirty-five
persons men women and children. The[y] afterwards threw the bodies into a
neighbouring waterhole. The surviving native … afterwards came to the spot,
got the bodies out of the waterhole and laid them in rows four deep.
About 10 km from Portland is an area called the ‘Convincing Ground’.

Sometime between 1832 and 1835, a whale broke its moorings in
Portland Bay and came ashore forcing a dispute over ‘ownership’ between
whalers and local Aboriginals, resulting in the death of an unknown
number of the Kilcarer gundidj clan. The site name perpetuates a mean-
ing of an attempt to ‘convince’ local Aboriginal of the new colonial domi-
nation of their Country and its resources.
In March 1840, upwards of 51 Aboriginals were massacred on
‘Konongwootong’, at Bryan’s Creek, and ‘the bones of the men and the
sheep lay mingled together bleaching in the sun at the Fighting Hills’.
‘Dead mens’ graves on the plain of the cattle run’ were recognisable in
mid-1841 and only one Aboriginal apparently lived to tell the tale. The
catalyst was an ‘attack’ on ‘Konongwootong’s sheep by the Konongwootong
gundidj. A similar incident occurred on an outstation to ‘Koroite’ in
August 1843, resulting in the appellation of ‘Murdering Flat’.
‘The Eumeralla War’, coloured by ‘Boldrewood’, vividly describes and
summarises the racial violence around the stony rises of Mt Eccles and
Eumeralla River in 1842 where an unknown number of the Dhauwurd
wurrung were massacred.
Those Stony Rises of Eeles [sic] could reveal many a tale of rapine and murder.
It was to these pathless solitudes that the Blacks were accustomed to drive sheep
pillaged from the flocks of the early Settlers … Some … years ago, however, the
nest of robbers was gained, and the tribe almost exterminated.
‘Gnegne’ [no good] was the Aboriginal appellation for the ‘Greenhill’
homestead site on Muston’s Creek after the late 1840s. The name recalls
‘the abundant fishing and favourite ground’ of the Omebegare rege gund-
idj clan, which became ‘extinct—so the natives informed me’ in late 1840
when the clan competed with shepherds for the pastures and a waterhole.
An elaborate Winter-season village was burnt as part of this conflict.

Upstream, three defenceless Aboriginal women and a child were mur-
dered in February 1842 on ‘Caramut’ at Lubra Creek. The incident,
popularised by ‘Garryowen’, became known as the ‘Battle of Lubra Creek’.
* * *
A Bush Burial (1890) portrays a lowly epitaph to death and burial in the
rural landscape and is synonymous with many colonial ritualistic scenes.
Like sacred rocks, graves scattered across the landscape and hold forebod-
ing and contemplation upon their discovery. The Stock-keeper’s Grave,
also, recalls the ominous power of bush burials, because
a funeral in the bush is a very rare and very impressive occurrence. I only know
of one other spot where a white man is buried; it is the grave of a shepherd who
was speared by the natives some time ago, and the valley where he now lies is
called the Murderer’s Valley. I never passed through it without feeling a kind of
horror. The grave is fenced in by rough paling.
Like isolated sacred shrines, they epitomised the sense of personal iso-
lation and refuge in deity traditions in the landscape.
There were many reports of isolated graves during this phase. A mur-
dered shepherd was buried in a grave where he fell on ‘Keilambete’,
‘enclosed with 4 hurdles’, in 1840. A colonial, who ‘died a natural death’,
was buried at The Woolshed [Hexham] in 1840, and a shepherd, who
was speared in 1840 on ‘Mount Rouse’, lay ‘fenced in and under a clump
of honeysuckle trees’ about 275 m from the homestead. A lone grave
marked by a simple wooden cross near Yambuk recalls a shepherd speared
in 1846. A lowly grave, with headstone and picket enclosure, was created
in 1854 near to ‘Gringegalgona’ homestead, testament to the spearing of
another squatter.
Some stations created small private cemeteries or burial enclosures
near their homesteads. A private cemetery enclosed by a stone wall was
established on ‘Naringal’ in 1841 for the station family and employees. A
private burial ground was established near a ford over the Mt Emu Creek
on ‘Carranballac’. A little cemetery, planted with cypress and pine to
196 D. S. Jones
replace the ‘honeysuckle’, enclosed in ‘post, rail and wire-netting’ fenc-

ing, marked the West Cloven Hills private cemetery. On a knoll looking
across to ‘Wooriwyrite’ and associated with Kilnoorat Manse, this enclo-
sure received several burials and gravestones from local stations from
1854. A sketch by von Guérard, in 1857, records the first lonely inscribed
headstone laid in the cemetery, surrounded by a cast iron fence. On
‘Gala’, a small cemetery was established in the late 1840s above Browns
Waterholes to host the graves of two shepherds and several local
Aboriginals. The plot includes the grave of a cook murdered at a spring in
nearby Haunted Gully. Marked by sentinel cypress trees, two small pri-
vate and fenced burial enclosures on ‘Merrang’ and ‘Hexham Park’ over-
look the Hopkins valley. A small cemetery for Aboriginals was also
established as part of the Lake Condah Mission Station.
As townships evolved, cemeteries were reserved. Camperdown
Cemetery was first reserved near the edge of Lake Colongulac, but in
1869, the graves were relocated to the Lake Gnotuk escarp in a linear
design arrangement, overlooking the Camperdown landscape. Near
Penshurst, the Boram Boram Cemetery was reserved in 1863 on 3 ha of
undulating land to a design of overlapping circular paths but with monu-
ments in rows. It was ceremoniously planted with Stone Pines. At the
envisaged township of Redruth, near Wannon Falls, ‘four graves of per-
sons drowned in attempting to cross the Wannon in time of flood’ were
observed in 1857.
* * *
To the colonials, distinct landscape features were quickly appropriated as

landmarks or ritualistic gathering points: directional signposts for travel-
lers, markers of territory for squatters, and places of resort. Volcanic hills
were easily identifiable beacons supplanting road signs until enclosure
forced travel into linear corridors. At night, the Southern Cross held aloft
a readily familiar directional symbol:
Fancy pictured a stray spirit, lost in that orbless space, directed homeward by
the gleam of that starry Light-house upon the borders of the dark ocean. It
would not be the only spirit guided heavenward amidst the gloom of nature by
the rays of the Cross.
Hills were the most discernible beacons. Ewen’s Hill, near Cobrico,
was long known as ‘Mackinnon’s Hill’ after the owners of ‘Marida Yallock’
station. Mt Elephant provided the ‘swagman’s lighthouse’ in the middle
of ‘Old Man Plain’. It rose with portent significance in the centre of Larra
(1857). Mt Abrupt assumed the role of the western ‘lighthouse’ on the
plains. It was a ‘grand and romantic feature … [that would, propheti-
cally,] serve as a beacon to welcome the settler and at once points out the
very tract of country he is seeking’. It reminded one ‘of Virgil’s—
“praeruptus aquae mons”; for in certain aspects it strongly suggests the idea
of a vast mountain-wave, of which the broken summit, curling and top-
pling over, is threatening to engulf some unfortunate vessel in the fath-
omless abyss’.
To another, the serrated points were threatening: ‘The teeth of the ter-
restrial saw [were] seen piercing the blue of the Heavens’. Other promi-
nent hills included Mt Noorat, Mt Napier, the ‘singular and abrupt
appearance’ of Mt Sturgeon, and the ‘solitary Hill’ of Mt Rouse. The
latter proved a popular local picnic spot in the 1840s and 1850s:
A grand picknick [sic] given by the neighbours on the top of Mt Rouse … in the
evening they all descended to Blackwood when there was Mischief … and hum-
buggin kept up the whole or rather short night and the next day we ascended to
Mount Rouse a second time and spent the Second night at a neighbour-
ing station.
One was always cognisant of Mt Shadwell’s presence while crossing

the plains:
The tall, flat-topped volcanic hill which hung before him like a gray faint cloud
when he started, now rears its fluted columns overhead, and now is getting dim
again behind him.
In delineating territory, it was necessary to etch marks on the land-

scape surface and to denote corridors. Natural features acquired legal rec-
ognition with spiritual meanings or were planted to bring forth
representations of past or nostalgic meanings.
198 D. S. Jones
An English Oak acorn was planted on ‘Merino Downs’, near to the

homestead, in 1843, to symbolise family growth, strength, and the Sussex
roots of the occupiers. An oak acorn was also planted adjacent to the
‘Purrumbete’ homestead in 1839 for similar symbolic purposes. An
elderly River Red Gum near Tahara, in the 1830s and 1840s, served as a
mail box and surrogate Anglican parsonage. A straggly Cherry Ballart for
many years served as the ‘boundary tree’ between ‘Gala’ and ‘Larra’. On
‘Goodwood’, inscribed stones were positioned to denote the corners of
the Pre-Emptive Right. And a stone from the thirteenth-century tower of
‘Earlston’, in the Borders, was set in the tower of ‘Ercildoun’ as a symbol
of family heritage and Scottish balladry.
Several places were appropriated as popular gathering places for resorts
and picnics. Unusual natural breaks in the landscape and water-based
features, deviations from the monotony of ‘Old Man Plain’, became cel-
ebrated in paintings that drew out their sublime and picturesque quali-
ties. Penshurst was supplied with a ‘never-failing spring, a real Bubbling
Well, much more useful than the one near Shanghai’.
Further west was the 26.2 m high Fall of the Wannon, a romantic and
‘sublimely beautiful’ scene with a ‘large body of water tumbling over its
projection’ disguising an immense cavern within. The scene inspired
many canvases, including The Wannon Falls (c.1860), which was ‘familiar
as a fact in our topography to blackfellows, shepherds and a very few
tourists—if individuals of this description can be said to hold a place in
our unpoetical community’. Here was ‘a very respectable cascade’ that
could be ‘both noisy and magnificent’ in winter. Though not comparable
to the Niagara or the Staubback, it was source for much artistic and liter-
ary interest. However, another falls, on the Hopkins, despite a 13.4 m
‘perpendicular descent … with terrific force and splendor’, provoked a
visitor to rhetorically ask: ‘Buvelot, Guérard, Chevalier, Clarke [sic], and
landscape painters all—even dotting Gritten and woolly Short—where
are your pictures of the Hopkins, its peaceful nooks, or grand old rocky
banks, and graceful foliage?’
Another popular gathering place was the Lakes Gnotuk and Bullen
Merri, colloquially termed the ‘Basin Banks’. These beautiful volcanic
basins provided a home to the District resident, a ‘most delightful pros-
pect’ to the visitor, to a picnicker on its shores many places for
enjoyment, and to the artist romantic inspiration. It was here that Lake
Bullen Merri (1857), Basin Banks 20 Miles South West of Mount Elephant,
1857 (1857), and Lake Gnotuk (1857) were composed by von Guérard.
The images conceived were relentlessly horizontal using the panoramic
viewpoint to aggrandise sublimity and the profound. This approach drew
from his earlier painting that celebrated the equally novel feature of Tower
Hill (1855). The latter was a feature of ‘enchanting character’, and a geo-
logical curiosity, prompting one to exclaim:
Let the few who value sentiment in the colony, who sympathize with nature,
who love an undisturbed communion with the grand and sublime, join one
and all in securing for themselves and posterity the authorized declaration, that
Tower Hill shall be an everlasting Reserve.
5.4 Split Slabs and Bluestone

He had just finished the erection of a neat cottage for his family. It was one of
the most substantial I had seen at a Squatting Station; being built of stone, and
having glass windows and deal floors. It was also regularly plastered with lime,
like a house in a town, instead of being merely daubed with mud, and having
a ceiling of canvass, like the better sort of habitations at such Stations; for at
most of them glass windows and deal floors, plastered walls, and any other ceil-
ing than the inner sides of the broad sheets of bark that serve for the roof, and
never thought of.
John Dunmore Lang, Phillipsland, …, 1847
* * *
The enclosure of space and its purposeful embellishment in artefacts were

conscious colonial objectives. One sought to conquer the landscape by
bounding it vertically and horizontally into a realm that imbued warmth,
safety, and legibility to European sensibilities. This was primarily achieved
in the form of shelters and territorial signs erected, often from raw mate-
rials and fabrics peculiar to the site, in designs that expressed their tradi-
tions and technologies.
200 D. S. Jones
The simple hut, therefore, was an artefact expressing a relationship and

an affinity with the landscape. It had a deliberate position in the land-
scape, fulfilled needs of shelter and security, and was erected from materi-
als to suit particular purposes and microclimatic circumstances. Thus, a
weatherboard split slab hut at ‘Golf Hill’ in 1838 could be described as
follows:
There was a sitting apartment on one end into which the door-opens the other
is partitioned off with rough boards and again subdivided into two bedrooms;
in each apartment there is a glass window, a thing seldom to be seen as deal
floors, but there is neither lathing nor plastering about the concern. An erection
at the gable of the sitting room forms the fireplace and a table and four stools is
all the furniture excepting two stretchers for beds and if more are wanted they
are placed on the floor.
A shelter was an evocative construction of manipulated space and

available resources. Shelter siting sought to take advantage of position
and drainage as well as seeking to enhance its security. As landscape ten-
ure was established shelter construction, and the erection of other shelter
forms and designs diversified and became more personal. The homestead,
especially, became a symbol of new social structures and domesticities
and of new-found environmental relationships.
This section examines shelters and other forms erected in this phase.
‘Primitive’ structures fulfilled basic shelter objectives, whereas structures,
from the 1850s, cast off this role to one of domesticity. The latter, how-
ever, were often preceded by the erection of woolsheds; spiritual refuges
for the new raison d’être and force on the landscape—sheep. Shelter
forms became a means to carve a myth based upon the ‘golden fleece’ out
of the landscape, from 1830 to 1870, and woolsheds became the misty
cathedrals to this deity.
* * *
The first structures in the District were ‘an unequivocally local response’
to the landscape. Expressive of the ‘Victorian primitive’, they brought
together resources of bark, timber, reeds, and mud, in the erection of

202 D. S. Jones
vernacular structures of varying sizes and functions. Consequently, these

structures were extremely susceptible to fire and microclimatic condi-
tions and were symptomatic of a highly mobile and insecure land tenured
squattocracy. Erected in humble fashion, there was much in these ver-
nacular structures that echoed the shelters fabricated by those inhabitants
the colonials were about to dispossess. Composed of thatch, sod, bark,
‘wattle-and-daub’, logs and slab, adobe, cobe, scoria stone, pisé, or half
timbering construction, drawn from the natural resources extant in the
landscape, they held the seeds of a distinct provincial architecture.
The initial structure was easily assembled from timber sapling poles and
bark, thatched with reeds, with an earthen floor ‘heaving with fleas’. The
first ‘Glenormiston’ homestead was ‘thatched with long Grass put on
about one foot [30.4 cm] deep’, in a complex ‘resembling … an English
farm’, as a variant to flattened bark or tarpaulin roofing. The grass was later
replaced by timber shingles before the introduction of galvanised iron
sheets and slate tiles in the 1850s. Grass thatching was used on a 3.6 ×
3.0 m turf hut at ‘Kolor’, reeds were applied at ‘Trawalla’, and ‘large cut
tail-grass out of the waterholes’ was used instead of recently burnt tall
grasses or reeds at ‘Wando Vale’. At ‘Lexington’, reeds were used on a ver-
nacular ‘mia-mia’, the first ‘Barongarook [House]’ homestead was ‘a hut of
slabs thatched with reeds’, and at ‘Squattlesea Mere’ a sod hut was ‘neatly
thatched with the tall, strong tussock grass’ growing in the nearby stream.
Thatching proved better weather protection than ‘a Tarpolin fastened
down by tying cords from the ends of Pins of woods stuck in the ground’.
Split slabs of green or dried timber commonly formed the walls of
‘primitive’ structures. ‘Gum slabs’ from ‘splitting timber’ were used on
the first ‘Purrumbete’ and ‘Barongarook [House]’ homesteads.
‘Keilambete’, in 1841, consisted of a ‘small slab hut and slab kitchen’.
Several ‘very good huts’ of slabs had been erected at ‘Grassmere’, and
‘Trawalla’ had been constructed from slabs ‘about an inch [2.5 cm] apart
from the next’ allowing plenty of light and ventilation into its ‘three
apartments’. Slab and sod huts at ‘North Brighton’ and ‘Squattlesea Mere’
included design features of port holes with sliding doors as fortification
defences against potential Aboriginal attacks. The ‘Barunah Plains’,
‘Challicum’, ‘Golf Hill’, and ‘Narrapumelap’ homesteads were also con-
structed, between 1839 and 1845, from logs
split into strong thick planks … placed on end in a kind of frame. They do not
fit close, but betwixt each plank there is generally an open space of about an
inch [2.5 cm], which those who like comfort plaster up with mud, but others
do not trouble them themselves.
Plastering with mud, pisé, or ‘wattle-and-daub’, of either exterior or

interior walls in split slab huts improved the comfort of the abode. A hut
at ‘Trawalla’ was later ‘plastered … with mud, which made it quite close’.
A ‘pisé hut’ was erected on ‘Blackwood’, interiors of several huts on
‘Grassmere’ in 1841 were plastered by ‘wattle-and-daub’, and the second
‘Purrumbete’ was ‘apparently of pise construction’. The second
‘Glenormiston’ homestead was built of ‘wattle and dab [sic]’, the timber
slab ‘Gherangermarajah’ [later renamed ‘Berry Bank’] homestead was
rough plastered inside and out, and by 1842 the ‘Eumeralla’ homestead
consisted of ‘1 long wattle and daub hut’. In ‘wattle-and-daub’, the walls
were ‘laced with a kind of basket-work between the uprights … [and]
plastered over with loam nearly as strong as lime’. ‘Merino Downs’ was
described in 1839 as a charming cottage ‘built of gum slabs’, plastered to
limit the wind, ‘with glass windows and cedar doors’, and roofing of bark
shingles. Bark and cut timber shingles proved a reliable alternative to
thatching on many huts, such as at ‘Buntingdale’ and ‘Challicum’.
An alternative to ‘wattle and daub’ was sod construction. Reminiscent
of peasantry structures in northern England and Scotland, they were
dependent upon suitable soils. At ‘Squattlesea Mere’, ‘clean-cut black
cubes, rather larger than bricks’ formed the walls of thatched sod huts,
and chimneys were erected from basalt or scoria field stone ‘which lay
around in profusion’. Similar forms of huts were erected at ‘Kolor’. The
first homestead at ‘Wando Vale’ was a thatched ‘neat rustic place … wall
turfed, chimney stone’, and in early 1838 sods were used on ‘Merino
Downs’ to line hut chimneys. On ‘Dunmore’, pisé de terre was used in
1843 for a number of huts, and a ‘turf hut’ was erected on ‘Trawalla’ as
both sleeping quarters and a kitchen near to the homestead.
Rubble scoria stone was also used in several instances. In the early
1840s, a homestead was built from the ‘honey-comb stone’, or scoria,
found on the plains at ‘Mount Hesse’, and mortared with stone chips,
sand, and burnt limestone. By 1842, a ‘stone hut of 4 rooms, thatch &
204 D. S. Jones
with verandah, passage, 26 pound doors and 24 pound doors moulded

with 2 windows’ graced the Mount Rouse Protectorate Station. At
‘Buntingdale’, two ‘slate’ huts had been erected by 1841. On ‘Mount
Elephant’, a tiny rubble cottage, called ‘Elephant Hut’, served as the
homestead. Locally quarried granite and kilned bricks were used to con-
struct the six roomed ‘Ercildoun’ homestead with its skylights, verandah,
and plastered walls in 1839. A bluestone cottage was also constructed at
‘Murndal’ in 1841.
These simple rubble structures foreshadowed the more elaborate use of
stone. Rubble ‘basalt or bluestone, and … ashstone or tufa [from] the
little plains about’ set in horizontal slabs, were the building materials for
the ‘Tandarook’ homestead constructed in 1843. A simple, ‘proportion-
ally comfortable’, brick cottage was erected at ‘Mount Shadwell’ in 1845,
and a homestead at ‘Sandford’, constructed from imported Van Diemen’s
Land sawn weatherboards, heralded changes in structures. Only at ‘Golf
Hill’, in 1846, was a brick Palladian designed homestead on bluestone
foundations, with dressed stone sills, a Venetian window, and a stone-
flagged verandah, adventurously erected before changes to the land ten-
ure laws in 1847.
Water supplies often dictated structure siting. Accordingly, choice sites
near to springs, streams, and freshwater lakes were preferred. A position
that provided both close water supplies and some vantage over the land-
scape offered strategic security from Aboriginals. Coincidentally, these
sites were often the choice ‘village’, or temporary encampment locations
for Aboriginal clans.
* * *
While squatters were assembling their landholdings, and erecting their

‘primitive’ homesteads, they were aiding the disintegration of Aboriginal
relationships to shelter. Failure to rebuild or maintain more permanent
shelters in the colonial onslaught may have been a sign of ‘acceptance that
the old ways were no longer possible’. Their abandonment also illustrated
Aboriginal disenfranchisement and dislocation from their Country.
Causes of shelter destruction were cattle grazing, ploughing, deteriora-

tion or abandonment, or the deliberate firing of huts. In the Wannon Valley,
before 1837, Aboriginals ‘had large well constructed winter huts, which
were destroyed by cattle’, but not rebuilt. On ‘Glenormiston’, an earthen
framed hut of ‘superior style’ was deliberately destroyed, and near ‘Yambuk’,
a whole camp was destroyed by the ‘burning “of mia-mias”—killing of pup-
pies—breaking—spears and bottles; bags, rugs, everything pitched into the
fire’, as signs that new systems of land domination and ‘triumph’ were taking
hold. Two large huts on mounds were burnt south of The Woolshed, and a
permanent village of ‘between 20 and 30 huts’ near Black Swamp was also
‘set fire to and demolished’, in the summer of 1840–1841.
Dislocation prompted abandonment of structures allowing deteriora-
tion. Decaying ‘bark and sapling’ huts, and stone house roofs, around
Lake Gorrie, were illustrative of this process. Stone fishery systems were
destroyed along the Merri, and bird snares and enclosures were burnt and
destroyed along the Grange Burn, as extensions of this process. Lack of
maintenance to extensive weir systems below Mt William and at Condah
Swamp also assisted in their deterioration and disintegration.
One naive but influential contemporary thesis on the cessation of hut
construction that perpetuated Aboriginal nomadic images suggested that
the inducements to plunder, their fear of the invaders, the depression caused by
the appearance of a race possessing appliances so much superior … and the
impossibility of preserving inviolate the lands which their people had held for
ages, caused them to wander aimlessly from place to place.
But the cause was more simple. Colonial denial of traditional, favoured,
and well-watered camp sites by their occupancy resulted in the abandon-
ment or destruction of permanent winter housing. These changes height-
ened a nomadic, and dislocated, relationship with the District’s landscape.
* * *
Changes in colonial land tenure laws and an influx of migrant women

around 1847 incited a minor boom in homestead construction. This
growth was further encouraged by the destructive havoc of Black Thursday
206 D. S. Jones
in 1851, and local market prosperity brought on by the 1851–1853 cen-

tral Victorian goldrushes. These new homesteads were more substantial
in size, often professionally designed, and made use of both sawn timber
and quarried bluestone. Parallel was the growth in related pastoral struc-
tures, especially woolsheds, homestead ‘villages’, and townships at numer-
ous stream fords. As a rule, woolsheds and related pastoral structures were
erected before the construction of a more substantial homestead.
These new homesteads were characterised by quarried and cut blue-
stone, verandahs encircling portions if not the whole homestead, and
careful attention to design form and decoration. ‘Bluestone’, the dark
basalt of the plains, became a ubiquitous uniting element in structural
design. It was, ironically, a material almost identical in colour and com-
position to the ‘whin stone’ used in Lowland Scottish vernacular architec-
ture. Being a ‘hard igneous rock which splits easily’, it was very difficult
to chisel dressings and ornamentations so integral in later Gothic designs,
yet ensured the ‘heavy and sombre magnificence’ sought in homestead
designs. Nonetheless, structures were mortared with local sand or lime-
stone in the dressings to ‘lighten the general appearance’ of the stone.
Although bluestone prevailed, locally kilned bricks, timber weather-
boards, dressed basalt rubble, or quarried freestone and sandstone that
resembled freestone from the Scottish Grampian Mountains, provided
alternative construction materials. Verandahs were a design response to
the climate, and a distinguishing feature of any homestead, village resi-
dence, or cottage, providing an important outdoor room for the structure.
Homestead designs also entertained architectural inspirations with the
conscious employment of architects or masons or drew ideas from numer-
ous nineteenth-century pattern books. Design styles for second period
homesteads echoed Classical or Georgian principles with a trend towards
Gothic Revivalism. Illustrations in Dictionnaire Raisonnée de L’Architecture
Française (1854–1863) and The Gentleman’s House (1865) provided inspi-
rations. Gothic Revival became the predominant design style for third
period homesteads in the later third of the century. Pastoral buildings on
‘Glenormiston’ drew from pages in The Architecture of the Farm (1853),
the manual Villa Rustica (1849) aided designs for ‘Murndal’, and Designs
for Cottage and Villa Architecture (c.1839) was the guide for many beauti-
fully crafted timber outbuildings on ‘Warrock’. These available texts
ensured an adherence to pattern book suggestions by many squatters and

architects resulting in complexes reminiscent of ‘old Scottish farm houses’
in the ‘picturesque Gothic traditions of rural England and Scotland’.
Possibly landscape design manuals, such as An Encyclopedia of Cottage,
Farm and Villa Architecture & Furniture (1833), may also have guided
landscape manipulation but little is recorded of their existence in home-
stead libraries. Vernacular and architectural design traditions of rural
England, and the Scottish Lowlands and Borders, were transplanted on
to the landscape as a nostalgic signature of the new squatters.
New homestead construction began slowly, but increased with the
Orders-in-Council of 1847 that guaranteed land tenure security. Basalt
was first used in 1849 on ‘Ripple Vale’ homestead at a time when ‘Barwon
Park’, with its steep galvanised iron hip roof enclosing an attic bedroom,
was constructed from rubble basalt. A rectangular attic homestead of
rubble ‘yellow stone’ was erected at ‘Kerangeballort’ [later renamed
‘Tarndwarncoort’] in 1848, and a skillion ‘stone house … of five apart-
ments’ with a wide verandah was erected at ‘Glenormiston’ in 1847. The
‘Gherangermarajah’ homestead, erected prior to 1851, was
made of a wooden framework of maple trees then covered with rough plaster,
white-washed on the outside and lined and papered inside and a bark roof—
only four rooms and two of them skillions; big roofs sloping to the outer wall
and very hot and small.
These forms were still austere, simple, and rectangular, lacking preten-
sion as compared to the ‘substantial and well-finished brick’ Palladian
homestead erected at ‘Golf Hill’ in 1846.
The year 1851 proved a watershed in the District. In one year, the land-
scape suffered the ravages of Black Thursday bushfires, the social rituals of
Colony separation from New South Wales, and the madness of gold dis-
coveries on its doorstep. Homestead development slowed in favour of land
acquisition and enclosure establishment, and it was only after 1853 that
construction recommenced. Emblematic were the single-storey bluestone
residences of ‘Burswood’ (1853) and the refined Regency styled ‘Maretimo’
(1854), with its spreading verandah, both erected near Portland. Other
homesteads constructed included the pre-cut weatherboard and brick
208 D. S. Jones
‘extensive mansion’ of ‘Barongarook House’ (1851), or the two-storey

‘Gherangmarajah’ with attic bedrooms covered by wooden shingles, which
became the first architecturally designed bluestone homestead in the
District. In the early 1850s, a timber board homestead 3.6 × 4.8 m, encir-
cled by a verandah, was built at ‘Gala’. In 1855, a locally quarried stone
second storey was added to ‘Tarndwarncoort’ and in 1856, a severe double
gabled slate-roofed two-storey homestead was erected on ‘Tandarook’. At
‘Glenormiston’, illustrations in The Architecture of the Farm (1853) influ-
enced the design of a new single-storey coursed basalt Italianate residence
with a wide encircling verandah in 1859.
The 1860s witnessed a shift in style from Classical and Colonial
Georgian to Gothic Revivalism. Emerging first in church designs, the
style thereafter diffused to outstations and shepherds’ cottages, before
taking sway in homestead designs. Following a trend from the common
man to the gentry, or deity edifice to village, retreating from the ‘monot-
ony of Classical Architecture’, it established a stylistic signature that
enhanced the ubiquitous bluestone and verandah. This diffusion also
occurred with woolshed, outstation and homestead compound complex,
and in church and village building designs, providing a unified regional
design language.
Given this trend, it was not until the late 1860s that the substantial
two-storey bluestone ‘Gala’ homestead, a new house at ‘Watch Hill’, an
austere two-storey bluestone homestead with timber verandah at ‘Ingleby’,
a simple Classical bluestone homestead at ‘Carranballac’, and a home-
stead at ‘Barunah Plains’, were erected. Extensions, including the square
coursed matching wings with encircling verandah added at ‘Kuruc-a-
ruc’, the bluestone bedrooms added to ‘Yarima’, the ‘four more rooms
and a tower … [in] Italian’ extensions to ‘Wurrook’, or the additions of a
recessed verandah and French windows made to ‘Irrewarra House’, how-
ever, were normal construction works. It was left to ‘Barwon Park’, a
massive two-storey bluestone mansion garnished with a cast iron lace
verandah and balcony, in ‘Romanesque’ style, erected in 1869, to set the
agenda for more advanced homestead forms.
New homesteads were normally erected near to former homestead
sites, unless a better site was available. ‘Chatsworth House’ on ‘Hopkins
Hill’ was repositioned well above the river to permit extensive views of
the landscape ‘in every direction’, and ‘Kerangeballort’ homestead was

rebuilt in 1855 on a prominent hill flank. Non-porous roofing materials
and brick cisterns also aided water collection and storage, alleviating the
need for sites in proximity to perennial water. Sites on lake edges, by
springs, and in sheltered and overlooking locations, often originally
selected, still remained choice homestead sites on ‘Purrumbete’, ‘Gala’,
‘Larra’, ‘Yalla-y-poora’, and ‘Gnarpurt’.
* * *
Woolsheds epitomised the change in human functional relationships

with this landscape. While fishery systems deteriorated, woolsheds were
progressively erected from available natural resources as single-purpose
structures. These shrines to the ‘golden fleece’ evoked more pride and
symbology than the homestead, requiring that their design and construc-
tion subjugate the homestead. Most woolsheds, for shearing of sheep,
were simple gable structures of timber and bark shingles. They quickly,
however, cast off austerity in favour of bluestone and galvanised iron
sheeting. The use of bluestone set the District apart from other vernacular
woolshed styles in Australia and continued the regional design language.
By the 1840s, woolsheds were well-established across the District. The
Woolshed [Hexham], established before 1841, became a local landmark
for many years because of its ‘very pleasant’ situation on the western
‘road’. ‘Purrumbete’ had a ‘good woolshed’, there was a ‘miserable wool-
shed’ on ‘Caramut’, and a ‘wool shed of slab’ timber was noticed on
‘Keilambete’ in 1841. A split weatherboard woolshed was erected at
‘Blythvale’ in the late 1840s, and a timber woolshed was constructed on
‘Kerangeballort’ in 1842. ‘Trawalla’ also had a timber woolshed, but in
c.1845 the first bluestone woolshed was constructed of blocks on a lime
mortar, with a bark and timber shingle hip roof, on ‘Eurambeen’. These
structures required much valuable timber that on one ‘wool shed lately
erected [in 1844], no less than 500 trees [were] barked and destroyed’.
Re-roofing had to be repeated again two years later.
By the 1850s, bluestone had become the standard building material.
The bluestone woolshed on ‘Larra’, erected in the late 1850s, formed the
pivot of the homestead compound. Occupying the central position in
210 D. S. Jones
Larra (1857), it is one of a number of paintings that celebrated the struc-

ture. In the late 1850s, a handsome squared bluestone woolshed with
spreading corrugated iron roof, differing in traditional plan by the place-
ment of a central ‘board’ for 16 shearing positions or ‘blades’, was erected
on ‘Wooriwyrite’. The ‘Gnarpurt’ cathedral-like bluestone woolshed,
erected in c.1854, with its wide arched doorways, also accommodated 16
shearers. At ‘Mount Hesse’, a massive ‘honeycomb’ scoria block wool-
shed, with 50 cm thick walls and an imported zinc dipped corrugated
iron roof was erected in 1852.
Woolshed construction continued in the 1860s as most stations gave
up their split slab sheds in favour of more technically designed bluestone
and iron structures. The ‘Berry Bank’ bluestone woolshed illustrated this
shift in building materials. The ‘Gorrinn’ woolshed (c.1867), constructed
from coursed bluestone and local timber, featured a hipped iron roof and
multi-paned central clerestory. A bluestone woolshed with raised floors
and cobblestone yard was constructed at ‘Merrang’ in 1865. A large
coursed bluestone woolshed with a flat hipped slate roof, pyramid weath-
erboard tower with slatted vent openings in the roof, was erected in 1865
at ‘Mount William’. Later, in the 1860s, a locally squared bluestone wool-
shed, with an unusual hexagonal central shearing board, central oculus,
radiating wings with gabled roofs and prefabricated framework and join-
ery, was designed and erected at ‘Kolor’. In contrast, a 16-blade, split River
Red Gum shearing shed was erected at ‘Gringegalgona’ in the mid-1860s.
* * *
The cleansing of fleece on sheep before clipping aided shearing and

improved the quality of wool for sale. Sheep washes progressed from
primitive versions in swamps and streams, to experiments with cold water
spouts and water troughs, before designed structures that permitted alter-
nate use of cold and warm water became common. Lake Terang proved a
popular washing place in the 1840s, and a waterhole at the intersect of
Mundy’s Gully and Lismore Creek served ‘Larra’.
Sheep were washed by being ‘dropped from a platform or jetty’ into
the waters of Mt Emu Creek at ‘Glenormiston’ in 1842. Northward at
‘Ercildoun’, experiments were undertaken with warm water ‘spout’
washing techniques to counteract problems experienced with their 1840

clip that was ‘dirtied and blackened by the scratching and Rubbing of the
scabby sheep’. Hot water dipping, followed by ‘spouting’, was not
successful
except in the case of about 40 or 50 sheep which were dipped in warm water
and then turned into a yard where they were allowed to drip for a about 20
minutes instead of being thrown into cold water immediately after their immer-
sion in the warm. In these the dirt was so much softened as to be in a great
degree removed before they reached the spout.
While warm water spouting, heated by wood-fired furnaces, proved

popular, experimentation with primitive sheep wash structures contin-
ued in the 1850s and 1860s. By 1855, sheep were washed on ‘Blackwood’
in a ‘dressing trough’ consisting of a ‘narrow lane and an enclined plain to
the water or trough’. High prices for washed fleeces on the London mar-
ket in the 1860s, however, encouraged the design of more sophisticated
and effective structures for hot water sheep washing.
The homestead unit also moved from a solitary primitive hut, and
hurdles, to a ‘village’-like cluster of structures, serving various purposes,
much like small English or Scottish hamlets. By 1840, ‘Trawalla’ had
grown from a slab hut to a mud-plastered hut surrounded by a ‘little
flower garden … a new store, a large dairy underground, a new wool-
shed’, a stockyard, and a ‘large covered shed for the calves at night, also
to milk in’. ‘Glenormiston’ resembled, ‘on a small scale, an English farm’.
In contrast, ‘Caramut’ consisted of only ‘1 hut, tolerably decent, 3 rooms
and a miserable hovel, unfinished for a kitchen. Also a miserable wool
shed and garden with bush fence’. On ‘Muntham’, by the mid-1840s, ‘all
the buildings, House, Garden, Wool Shed etc., seem[ed] very com-
plete … [having been erected] without much regard to expense’. The
homestead, with original attic and stone cellar, was now clad in hand split
weatherboards and shingles, and a one and a half storey red brick English-
styled barn on granite foundations had been constructed. Similar scenes
were evolving on ‘Warrock’, with its 30 timber and brick pattern book
inspired structures in a 1 ha homestead complex, and on ‘Sandford’, as
portrayed in Australian Homestead, Sanford (c.1850), with its homestead,
woolshed, and associated structures.
212 D. S. Jones
Following the construction of a homestead, an array of other struc-

tures were erected around this focus. The cluster included stores, a
kitchen, a meathouse or coldstore, separate mens’ huts, stable, horse and
bullock yards, a blacksmith’s shop, a barn, a woolshed and holding yards,
and often a dairy. A large utilitarian rubble basalt stable was erected near
to ‘Irrewarra’ homestead in 1848. Between 1843 and the mid-1860s,
timber and stone cottages were also erected around the original timber
attic ‘Carranballac’ homestead.
Tenure stability in the 1850s increased building works. The homestead
complex diversified to include a manager’s or overseer’s cottage, and often
many of the original vernacular timber structures were reconstructed in
brick or bluestone. The original ‘men’s kitchen and sleeping places’ at
‘Glenormiston’ by 1859 had deteriorated into miserable earthen floored
huts of slabs prompting their urgent replacement by a ‘design for agricul-
tural laborers’ cottages of [a] one-and-half storey arrangement’ resem-
bling Plate XIII of The Architecture of the Farm (1853). By the mid-1850s,
construction of the on-site kilned red brick men’s quarters, blacksmith’s
and carpenter’s shops, and stable, amongst other structures, on ‘Murndal’
had begun to shape the irregular circular English ‘village-like atmosphere’
of the homestead’s arrival court. At ‘Wooriwyrite’, a similar ‘“village”
enclosure’, comprising the bluestone stables with hayloft, rubblestone
kitchen, harness rooms, workshop, cart-sheds, blacksmith’s shop, store-
rooms, timber woolshed, and gardens, was positioned close to the weath-
erboard and bluestone homestead. On ‘Mount Hesse’, ‘Purrumbete’,
‘Mount Elephant’, ‘Larra’, ‘Koort-koort-nong’, ‘Minjah’, ‘Muntham’,
‘Ercildoun’, ‘Warrock’, and ‘Hopkins Hill’, similar ‘village’ complexes
were being erected. The latter consisted of ‘cottages in every direction for
the most part composed of splendid bluestones and in the centre … a
simple unpretending looking edifice to be used both as a church and
school house’ along the entry drive to ‘Chatsworth House’. The image of
Larra (1857), with its collection of ‘outbuildings and the new … home-
stead spread horizontally across the plain’, also illustrates this trend.
While ‘villages’ of pastoral structures clustered around the original
homesteads, hamlets of commercial and industrial structures were also
evolving at river crossing points, fords, surveyed townships, or around
freshwater springs below volcanic cinder cones. Townships often started
with the erection of an inn at a ford or spring, such as the ‘wattle-and-

daub’ ‘Frenchman’s Inn’ built at the Woady Yalloak River crossing. The
‘ancient Bush Inn’ at Mortlake was erected in the 1840s of basalt ‘Tufa or
Ash’ with timber slabs and was one of many inns considered the ‘most
dreadful abomination’. These were
generally built of wood and weatherboards; the floor is boarded, and a fine rat-
tling breeze rushes in at all parts … The stable, as it is called, is a place tossed
up of all manner of things; it has a kind of a roof, with slab sides of the rudest
material, and is often dangerous in passing, from old spike nails and broken
bottles; dung and filth are there a foot or two [30.4 or 60.9 cm] deep; at the
head of the staff is an old gin case fixed as a manger for oaten hay.
Most early township structures echoed this ‘primitive’ style. The first
store erected at Mortlake, in 1854, was of green cut slabs with gaps that
rapidly widened as the panels dried. This was very different from the
three-storey utilitarian squared rubble flour mill erected just two years
later in Mortlake, with its windmill driven machinery. In 1857, the mill
installed a steam engine to operate new machinery for flour production
to counter the unreliable winds and erected an impressive square blue-
stone chimney that became a local landmark. The homestead at
‘Goodwood’, in 1856, also ran a small waterwheel-driven grist mill with
an extensive water race some 3.6 cm deep.
Quarries, as centres of artifice creation, became larger commercial
operations to serve the demand for bluestone construction materials. A
quarry near Tooli-o-rook [Derrinallum] supplied most of the 50 cm thick
stones used in the township’s buildings, as well as nearby homestead
buildings.
Township buildings were mostly ‘irregularly built and situated’ of
weatherboard, timber slab, pisé, or bluestone. Forming a collective non-
descript ‘village’ clustered around the hallowed inn, they were similar in
arrangement to homestead ‘villages’. A visitor to Rokewood poi-
gnantly wrote:
This place is colonially termed ‘a township’, there is nothing like what you
would call a street in it … all that catches the eye is about four or five wooden
erections painted white with verandahs and several brownish things scattered
214 D. S. Jones
here and here which when you come nearer, you find to be the un-painted
houses of the inhabitants, which are like the others made of weatherboarding
and roofed like them with bark or shingles.
5.5 Cowpastures of Themeda

The ocean of unbroken greenery that lay to the eastward [of ‘Lyne’] was flame
tinted by the rising sun …
‘Rolf Boldrewood’, Old Melbourne Memories, 1884
* * *
To colonial intruders, the landscape in the 1830s and 1840s was ‘a fair
blank sheet’, a land ‘open and available in its present state’ where ‘the set-
tler will have no timber to clear away’. A visitor could remark, in pictur-
esque terms, of Wando valley:
By Jupiter this is a paradise of a country—an El Dorado. The cowpastures are

positively inferior to it in excellence. Here we have undulating ground clear of
timber except occasional picturesque clumps of trees. Mould of the finest and
richest black soil of great depth, and grass and herbage so verdant and thick that
the ground is literally matted with it.
While the vision was joyous, the ‘garden’ still needed enhancement
through colonial lenses. Clearing of weeds, preparation of soil, additional
soil fertilising, and exploratory planting with new seeds were all deemed
necessary to improve the ‘garden’. It was left to the ‘wands’ of the axe,
plough, fire-stick, and seed packet, to fulfil this agenda. Few indigenous
plants were envisaged as useful, except for fodder or warmth. Only the
wrath of nature indicated that all was not ‘paradise’, in colonial eyes, and
that the ‘cowpastures’ could sustain only so much disruption to the
Aboriginal-constructed cultural landscape.

216 D. S. Jones
This section examines the garden of the 1830s–1870s and the way in
which it was prepared and cultivated. ‘Wilderness’ was captured, cleared
and conquered, new crops and grasses were diffused over old patterns and
regimes, and cultivation modes shifted from ‘natural gardening’ to
orchestrated monoculture for the benefit of sheep. In particular, it is the
botanical images of this landscape, disruptions of previous practices, acts
of clearing and replanting, and the retribution of nature, that are reviewed
in this section. In the passage of time, the progressive disappearance of
summer reddened Kangaroo Grass inflorescences signalled that the land-
scape surface was being rewoven to serve alternative browsing needs. The
objective remained the same—of feeding, sheltering, and stabilising—
but the ‘sheet’ was purposefully reorganised to satisfy different objectives
and ideological structures.
* * *
In 1838, Mitchell characterised the Western District landscape as being

‘a low tract consisting of very rich black soil, apparently best imaginable,
for the cultivation of grain, in such a climate’.
There was no mention of existing vegetation or lack of it; rather, it was
the potential crops that generated an agricultural agenda. Colonial eyes
read the ‘undulating ground clear of timber except occasional picturesque
clumps of trees’, with superior ‘cowpastures’ which ‘will be inhabited ere
long’, as romanticised notions of landscape. These eyes failed to discern
an extensive and complex ‘monotonous’ savannah grassland dotted with
‘sheoak’ and ‘honeysuckle’, open woodland swaths of Manna and River
Red Gums, heaths, tree-lined watercourses, and thick stringybark or
Silver Banksia forests. Each portion of this landscape held differing char-
acteristics and experienced varying degrees of change between 1830
and 1870.
The Wannon Valley, in 1836, was described as ‘an open grassy coun-
try … hills round and smooth as a carpet,—meadows broad, and either
green as an emerald, or of a rich golden colour … That extensive valley
was enlivened by a winding stream, the waters of which glittered through
trees fringing each bank’. Another squatter saw it as a ‘paradise of a coun-
try … [with] occasional picturesque clumps of trees’, and others
nostalgically recalled its resemblance to the rolling downs of Sussex and

Wiltshire, in 1837. In the 1840s, the Valley was praised for its ‘lovely
dark green’ grasses in a ‘landscape [that] looked like a park’. It was mapped
as ‘Fine open country’, highly regarded for ‘the quality of soil abundance
of Grass and picturesque Scenery’, and within wound a serpentine stream
past ‘thinly timbered’ and bare hills, ‘rolling downs … [and] well grassed’
dales. In the 1850s, the Valley was still viewed as a ‘realm of beauty …
[at] the gates of Paradise of Peris … with its dark green fringe of Gum
trees … with their unshaded verdure and their flowery gems’.
When Mt Napier was first climbed by Europeans in 1836, the stony
country consisted of prolific ‘eucalyptus and mimosa’ exhibiting ‘a remark-
able uniformity in the size of the trees’. Here was luxuriant and dense
growth, ‘thin rank grass’, with ‘banksias’ covering the south-eastern
slopes. It was later portrayed as ‘a beautiful cattle country’, with verdant
‘anchistiria’ and Austral Bracken surrounding numerous swamps and
light to dense Manna Gum, Blackwood and Tree Everlasting growth.
Around ‘Lyne’ and ‘Weerangourt’, the slopes were ‘lightwood-crowned’
and covered in ‘stinted [sic] gum and Banksia … blacks and stunted
gums’. By the 1850s, the ‘rugged sides’ of Mt Napier were being thinned
by clearing activities, and the exposed and ‘bald hill’ stood out like
a beacon.
The locality of Bessiebelle and ‘Squattlesea Mere’, revealed in by
‘Boldrewood’, was described as
deep-swarded, thickly-verdured as an English meadow. Wild duck swam about

in the pools and meres of the wide misty fen, with its brakes of tall reeds and
‘marsh-marigolds’—‘the sword-grass and the oat-grass and the bulrush by the
pool’ … a pathless waste … with beautiful umbrageous blackwood, or native
hickory, one of the handsomest trees in Australia.
The landscapes of ‘Kangatong’, ‘Minjah’, and ‘Quamby’ were charac-

terised in the early 1840s as ‘heavily timbered, rough country, much of it
swampy’. The area was rich in Manna and Swamp Gums, Blackwoods,
dense reed beds, stands of Leptospermum spp., and covered ‘with a sward
of kangaroo grass two or three feet [60.9 or 91.4 cm] high and as thick as
a field of barley’. The forests were ‘stunted or dwarf kind. Banksia
218 D. S. Jones
prevailed also the eucalyptus, stringy bark and gum, lightwood, cherry
tree, and wattle, also tea-tree’. By the 1850s and 1860s, most of these
forests had been ringbarked, cleared and burnt, and swamps were being
drained and ploughed of their shrubs and grasses.
On the open plains, around ‘The Woolshed’ [Hexham] and Caramut,
the landscape was ‘lightly timbered with honeysuckle (stunted) and gum
trees … [which were] more like shrubs”. A visitor perceived an open
savannah plain, thinly spaced with banksia, stunted gum, eucalyptus’ not
more than 60 cm in diameter, and plenty of the ‘grass anthistiria’. The
scarcity of timber, on the ‘barren spewy soil’, that resulted over the 1850s
and 1860s reinforced that plains’ ready acceptance as a treeless image.
Open woodland forests of Manna and River Red Gums, groves of
‘wild honeysuckles’, and a verdant grassland, occupied the plains around
‘Wooriwyrite’ in 1840. This pattern was also recorded in von Guérard’s
sketch of Mount Shadwell … (1857) with thick vegetation marking the
serpentine Mt Emu Creek. Colonial tradition records that native grasses
in this locality grew in tussocks permitting a squatter to walk about with-
out treading on them.
Mt Noorat was densely forested with ferns, Manna and Swamp Gums,
Blackwoods, and numerous shrubs in 1841. The landscape around was
‘tolerably well wooded’, ‘very thickly timbered’ towards the south, and
‘marine plants and eucalyptus’ skirted lake and swamp edges. ‘Healthy,
but comparatively young trees’ covered all sides of the eminence in the
1850s, although cutters were felling part of the timber. A shepherd could
still complain about ‘the blasted place being so thickly timbered and
scrubby’ in the late 1850s.
In the ‘garden of Australia’, an immense meadow of thick Kangaroo
Grass and ‘handsome blackwood trees’ thinly coated the landscape
around Timboon [Camperdown] and ‘Purrumbete’. In 1844, the site for
Timboon was still covered by a ‘dense scrub of Tea-tree’, but by 1857, a
settlement had been established on the ‘rich sward’. Forests of open Silver
Banksia, Manna Gum, and Blackwood fringed Lake Purrumbete and
luxuriant foliage still grew in the ‘crater garden’ of Mt Porndon. It was a
‘good grassy land’ on the edge of the ‘treeless’ plains.
It was a dry dusty landscape, ‘strongly antagonistic to trees’, with only
unbrowsed tussocks of grass swaying in the winds like a ‘waveless sea’. Tall
Kangaroo Grass brushed horse girths, masses of Silver Tussocks, ‘blue

devil’ or ‘chalicum’ grew with isolated stunted River Red Gums on the
plains and along stream edges, and Prickly Moses held firm on stony out-
crops. The only ‘trees’ consisted of ‘stunted banksias’ and some ‘dwarf oak’.
The plains around ‘Larra’, in the 1840s, were covered in open wood-
land and scrubland rich in Drooping Sheoak, Silver Banksia, Blackwood,
and River Red Gum. To find the cattle, a shepherd had to climb Mt
Elephant, which was cloaked in trees and shrubs, and then take a bearing
on your beasts.
From ‘Baangal’ northwards to ‘Challicum’ and ‘Yalla-y-poora’, the
plains surrounding upper Fiery and Mt Emu Creeks were open, lightly
wooded, with good grass. It was undulating country with numerous salty
lagoons ‘skirted by small trees and shrubs’, river courses marked by ‘young
swampy gum trees’, damp hollows of tussock grass, clumps of ‘banksia
(stunted)’, and the occasional ‘lightwood and cherry tree and oak’. Only
the clumps of Silver Banksia afforded some shelter, but the landscape was
still considered ‘well suited for agricultural and pastoral purposes’. Rolling
off in ‘great waves’ were seas of Kangaroo, Tussock, and Wallaby Grasses,
and ‘chalicum’ where only dust mists arose from Fiery Creek like portent
shrouds. Of this place, one bored traveller wrote in 1857:
Other dreary plains—cold, exposed and wet in winter; parched dusty and broil-
ing in summer. Their dull uniformity depresses one. There is nothing to interest
you. The eye beholds nothing but the circular horizon, like a boundless sea.
In the shelter of Gariwerd, at Dunkeld, parkland settings ‘of open

downs, thinly studded with lightwood, banksia, cherry tree and well
grassed’ graced the plains. Swaths of banksia and ‘thick belts of lofty tea
tree scrub (Leptos Permum) [sic]’ swayed amidst thick grass and reed
covered lakes and depressions. ‘Gums and lightwood trees in chief ’
inhabited the ‘vast extent of open downs’.
* * *
The image of a ‘blank sheet’, of ‘green hills’ uninhabited, was perpetuated

because ‘so harmless were these natives’ and the landscape that both
220 D. S. Jones
availed themselves of encroachment. Aborigines were ardent ‘natural’ cul-

tivators, and the timing of their activities was determined by cues in the
natural environment. Their ‘harmlessness’ and passive practices enabled
the easy disruption of traditional root gathering and firing activities.
Only very perceptive colonists recognised the value of these practices and
the benefits of the products.
The central staple plant, Murnong, was cherished fodder for the new
browsers—sheep, cattle, and bullocks. As Mitchell first observed in 1836:
‘the cattle are very fond of the leaves of this plant and seemed to thrive upon
it’. Failure to realise that its perennial growth was dependent upon seasonal
firings, and passive cultivation practices, resulted in the rapid depletion and
senescence of the species as a nutritious fodder for sheep. Loss was visually
evident, but comprehension of the impacts wrought was limited. As sheep
devoured Murnong foliage, they actively competed with Aboriginals for this
nutritious food source. While sheep ate ‘the tender shoots of almost every
shrub … and nibble[d] the shoots of other arenaceous-loving plants’
Aboriginals complained about their disappearing ‘Parm-pun and Tuerer-
corn’: ‘jumbuc (sheep) eat the roots’. Deliberate prevention of harvesting
practices also occurred. Below Mt Burrumbeep, Aboriginals were impeded
from reaping ‘Panim, murnong a privilege they would not be permitted
except under my protection’; ‘they are driven off the runs’.
Integral to Murnong cultivation was firing the landscape. The
Aboriginal practice of ‘fire-stick farming’ was anathema to squatters who
perceived that it removed grass and fodder supplies, endanger sheep lives,
raze timber ‘improvements’, and constituted a psychological threat. ‘They
burn the grass, the better to see these roots but this burning is a fault
charged against them by squatters’ was an unusually perceptive colonial
insight to a long-standing practice. ‘Fires in the bush are often the work
of the natives, to frighten away white men’, and, ‘the natives … at Mt
Emu … set fire to the grass, burned a large extent of the country …
[prompting squatters] to bring their sheep home again until the grass
grew again’, were common reports.
Colonial consumption of indigenous plant foods was limited.
Murnong, however, proved a nutritious vegetable supplement to some
squatters’ diets. The white tuberous root, whose ‘taste is more like a tur-
nip’ was eaten raw, cooked, or added to soups at ‘Trawalla’. At
‘Gherangermarajah’, the children prized the ‘earthy taste’ of the roots as a

‘great delicacy’, and one squatter near ‘Mount Mitchell’ perceived that
the ‘root might be cultivated’ in gardens as a vegetable food.
* * *
On September 9, 1836, five men deliberately cleared the summit of Mt

Napier for non-agricultural purposes. Thus, began the colonial quest to
clear the ‘wilderness’ and control the landscape to facilitate pastoral activ-
ities, cultivation of crops, and the erection of squatting infrastructure.
Though the park-like image implied limited timber, much of the later
reported openness resulted from prolific browsing of banksia and Cherry
Ballart on the plains and in forest swaths, together with the rampant fell-
ing, debarking, and ringbarking of Manna and River Red Gums, and of
stringybark trees on hills, along watercourses, and across the plains. The
fallacy of the image of openness achieved by 1870 is depicted in von
Guérard’s Mount Shadwell … [sketch from] MacArthurs Hill [Mt
Meningoort] (1857) which clearly portrays extensive open savannah
woodlands of banksias, River Red and Swamp Gums, Cherry Ballarts,
Blackwoods, Drooping Sheoaks, and wattles. By 1900, this landscape
was largely devoid of trees and shrubs: it was ‘rich and beautiful and has
all the appearance of a Nobleman’s extensive domain’.
To squatters, trees and shrubs were commodities to clear, and used for
fencing and for the construction of shelter. Scientific thought also argued
that timber felling stimulated grass fecundity:
The growth of good, nutritive grass is prevented [by trees]; … The only practi-
cable remedy proposed is that of Girdling the trees. By this simple process we cut
off communication between the root and the branches, as the band of liber or
new wood is exposed in the removal of the bark. The sap ceases to run, the leaves
fall but once more, and the grass is open to sun and air.
In keeping with this philosophy, trees were extensively ringbarked in

the thick woodlands that surrounded the plains. Trees were also felled for
building materials, sheep hurdles and especially for firewood. Because
trees were highly treasured for fires and bullock fodder few banksia and
222 D. S. Jones
Cherry Ballart remain on the plains today. Even islands of dense wood-
lands on hills, such as Mt Noorat, Mt Rouse, Mt Elephant, and Mt
Napier, were transformed into grassed ‘cloven hills’ by 1900. One could
view an ‘ocean of unbroken greenery’ in the 1830s, but by 1841, the
same scene was being felled of timber:
The settlers for 25 miles [40.2 km] round procure their timber from this hill
[Mt Noorat] … Some white men were splitting timber and making han-
dles … Ascended Knorart by an easy path on the SE side, made by the splitters
and handle makers in quest of timber with their drays … From the top of
Knorart had a fine view of this woodland country. Indeed the country is toler-
ably well wooded.
Felling was rampant and unforgiving. The cross-cut saw aided felling,
the adze stripped and split logs, the auger drilled holes for pegs and
wedges, and the mallet and ‘jumper rod’ assisted splitting. On ‘The
Union’, some 6070 ha of heavily timbered Blackwood, wattle, and
Drooping Sheoak were ringbarked, cleared, and burnt. Much timber was
also cleared and swamps drained on nearby ‘Quamby’. Homestead sites
were opened up, and dray loads of Shelford Forest wood were cut and
carted to ‘Mount Hesse’. The Digby stringybark forests supplied many
shingles, palings, and post rails for the surrounding stations. Thick bank-
sia forests around ‘Monivae’ and ‘Murroa’ stations were extensively felled
till ‘scarcely one remains’. Timber hurdles were carted from Mt Langi
Ghiran and Mt Cole forests to supply ‘Yalla-y-poora’. Kilometres of
brush fences, substitutes for hurdles, ‘simply the trees as they are felled
thrown along in long lines, and their branches piled along them’, were
common sights on many runs.
Like Aboriginals, squatters made use of available natural resources to
fabricate shelters. Timber in shingles, slabs, and boughs was used to fulfil
this objective. Reeds and swamp grasses provided thatching, or sheets of
bark substituted for shingles. The practice was extensive, concerning some:
I beg leave again to state [that] the destruction of timber by barking to cover
huts & sheds is so great that in a short time little of the valuable timber will be
left. In most parts of the District it is scarce, & in many parts where there were
fine forests there are few good trees. One wool shed lately erected, no less than
500 trees have been barked and destroyed. In two years this must be done over
[and re-shingled] again … Some check should be given to this destruction.
The paucity of timber, while ideal for sheep grazing and easy station
establishment, meant that it readily disappeared for infrastructure and
firewood needs. The arrival of fencing, promulgated in enclosure and
land tenure requirements for ‘improvements’, hastened this loss.
Wood for fuel and hurdles, from the Shelford stringybark forests, was
regularly carted to ‘Mount Hesse’ in 1857. Apart from forest clearing the
browsing by sheep, cattle, and bullocks of the choicest shoots, grasses,
reeds, and tree foliage and the disruption of regular firings suppressed
plant fertility. A common observation was that ‘sheep and cattle tread
down the young trees’. Sheep especially preferred the rosettes and shoots
of Murnong, but could be satisfied by other plants. At ‘Wando Vale’ suc-
culent native grasses were quickly devoured: ‘all was eatable; nothing had
trodden the grass before them. I could neither think nor sleep for admir-
ing this new world to me who was fond of sheep’. At Mt Emu, grass
which ‘mingled with wild herbage, of which sheep are remarkably fond’
was rapidly devoured. Below Mt William, reed and rush fringed creeks
were favoured food to ‘hungry cows and gaunt working bullocks’, and
bullocks regularly felled sheoaks below Mt Elephant to feed their charges.
On ‘Wooriwyrite’ grazing stock wantonly consumed tree and grass shoots
preventing their growth into saplings and trees. Possums also adapted to
the juicy new foods carried on fruit trees, and their populations escalated
without regular hunts; the attributed cause of much eucalypt dieback
around Terang in 1861.
Recognition of vegetation loss was not wholly perceived except where
it could be linked to increased erosion and pasture decline. Instead, the
ideology of tree girdling held sway and the landscape deteriorated.
Concentrated browsing and trampling by sheep, hard hoofed animals,
also assisted soil compaction. Tall perennial summer grasses, especially
Kangaroo Grass, were over browsed permitting succession by shorter
perennial winter native grasses, such as Danthonia and Stipa spp. Native
herbs and annuals became more common as the first exotic grasses and
weeds took hold. As grazing disturbance increased, the density of
224 D. S. Jones
introduced species in deference to native grasses, also increased. The loss

of deep-rooted perennials reduced soil stability and moisture absorption,
thereby increasing erosion, landslip risks, and surface water runoff.
At ‘Wando Vale’, a squatter perceptively noted these changes and their
impacts:
Herbaceous plants and grasses give way for the silk-grass and the little annuals,
beneath which are annual peas, and die in our deep clay soil with a few hot
days in spring, and nothing returns to supply their place until later in the win-
ter following. The consequence is that the long deep-rooted grasses that held our
strong clay hill together have died out; the ground is now exposed to the sun,
and it has cracked in all directions, and the clay hills are slipping in all direc-
tions; also the sides of precipitous creeks—long slips, taking trees and all
with them.
The extensiveness of debarking left another squatter to ponder the

future of the ‘valuable timber’, to question the disappearing ‘tall reeds and
dead wattles’, and to reflect upon the dying trees. The heavily porous soils
and previously untrampled grasses and swards that made the surface
‘comparable to a bed of sponge … [so] as to render fast riding over them
absolutely dangerous …’ changed. The native pastures, under the ‘weight
of thousands upon thousands of the sharp little hoofs of sheep’, shifted to
a different constitution. These distinctive changes provoked concern:
A rather strange thing is going on now. One day all the creeks and little water-
courses were covered with a large tussocky grass, with other grasses and plants …
[but now] springs of salt water are bursting out in every hollow or w
atercourse …
[making] the strong tussocky grasses die before it, with all others … The strong
clay cracks; the winter rain washes out the clay … [and] when rain falls it …
rushes down these ruts, runs into the larger creeks, and is carrying earth, trees,
and all before it.
Soil compaction and vegetation defoliation also increased the duration

of surface water retention and strengthened salinity intrusion. As a con-
sequence, swamp draining and ploughing measures were seen as urgent
remedies. Swampy areas around Lake Keilambete, and the Peejark,
Winnidad, and Kolora marshes and swamps, were perhaps the first major
areas drained after works on the Rutledge Survey swamps below Tower
Hill. New plough machinery also assisted soil tilling and stump removal
by replacing bullock and chain clearing methods.
* * *
The vegetative constitution of the landscape diversified in parallel to these

changes. Squatters brought a Noah’s Ark of familiar vegetable, fruit,
flower, and ornamental seeds and plants, and experimented with pasture
grasses. New seeds and exotic weeds were quickly diffused by stock move-
ments, and native annuals invaded the spaces between tall deep-rooted
perennials.
Early gardens were purely functional, providing vegetables to supple-
ment food diets. As colonial women ventured into the ‘wilderness’, and
station homesteads became more established, fruit trees and ornamental
flowers were introduced. Seeds came from England or were imported
from gardens and seed merchants of Van Diemen’s Land, before seed
merchants became established in Melbourne. A conscious and nostalgic
desire to propagate vegetables and fruits resulted in a great diversity of
plant types being introduced. Later, English and North American orna-
mental and shelter tree species were planted, unless mailed as seeds.
Plenty of potatoes, green gooseberries, raspberries, ‘roses in abun-
dance’, numerous flowers enclosed by a 1.8 m high fence, with a veran-
dah graced by ‘purple hardenbergia’ and ‘scarlet kennedia’, greeted a
visitor to ‘Merino Downs’ in 1839. Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips,
and corn, also, were grown in such abundance enabling their export to
Adelaide from Portland in the 1840s. Around ‘Purrumbete’ extensive
gardens of flowering annuals, roses, vegetables, willows, tree, ferns and
numerous shrubs were established, many of which were depicted in von
Guérard’s sketches From the Verandah at Purrumbete (1858). The gardens
of ‘Ercildoun’ were planted with potatoes, melons, tobacco, fruit trees,
weeping willows and vines of the Black Frontignac, Verdellio and Muscat
varieties. An enclosed garden was quickly established at ‘Trawalla’ in
1839 with seeds imported, from England and Van Diemen’s Land, result-
ing in numerous potatoes, flowers, carrots, green peas, gooseberries, cur-
rants, raspberries, and strawberries for the kitchen table. Other squatters,
226 D. S. Jones
at ‘Condah Hills’ and ‘Wando Vale’, took great pride in their vegetables
and their ‘great umbrageous apple trees … covered with fruit of the finest
and size and quality’.
In 1851, the surrounding landscape on ‘Gherangermarajah’ was a ‘deso-
late dreary place, not a blade of green grass’, except a large enclosed garden
dominated by bearing fruit trees, ‘sweet smelling white flowers’, and
orchids. A similar garden was nurtured at ‘Wooriwyrite’ where, through a
‘valance of vines’ on the verandah, one could look down over the fruit trees
in the front garden, and the vegetable garden beyond, in a panorama simi-
lar to the view from the verandah of ‘Langi Willi’ that was framed by pas-
sion-flowers, jessamines, and magnolias. As swamps were drained around
Lake Keilambete one squatter planted hawthorn hedges along the drainage
channels. In the valleys of the Barwon and Moorabool, and on the Barrabool
Hills, vines were planted from 1845 as part of a burgeoning wine industry.
Pines were planted along the sweeping driveway to ‘Monivae’, and orchards
of apples and pears, were cultivated with numerous flowers and vegetables
at ‘The Hill’, near Colac. Grapes were tried on ‘Berry Bank’, tobacco on
‘Gnarkeet’ in the late 1840s, and vines were planted in the extensive gar-
dens surrounding the ‘Koort-koort-nong’ homestead.
Seeds of numerous invasive exotic plants also came with all these intro-
duced species. The first, and most recognisable, were the emblematic
Spear and Variegated Thistles of Scotland that naturalised from the early
1850s. These were followed by other escapees, including hawthorns, orig-
inally used in hedges, Sweet Briars from abandoned garden sites, black-
berries that were introduced for their fruits and rivulet stabilisation
potential, and South African Boxthorns that were originally conceived as
hedge plants. The Burr Medic, or ‘trefoil burr’, also spread westward from
the foothold it gained in the Moorabool River pastures in 1853.
At ‘Murndal’, hawthorns were extensively planted around the home-
stead and along paddock boundaries as ornamental and shelter hedges.
Boxthorn and Osage Orange were also used sparingly. Thistles were first
perceived as problems on both ‘Murndal’ and ‘Purrumbete’ in the late
1870s. In contrast, thistles were taking hold around ‘Dunmore’ by the
mid-1850s, requiring employment of thistle gangs.
* * *
Apart from ornamental trees, vegetables, fruit trees, and flower gardens,
colonial attention was focused upon the cultivation of cereal crops and
grasses. Wheat and sheep fodder grasses were extensively sown during the
1840s–1860s until wheat and grain were sown in the Wimmera and
Mallee. Thereafter lucerne and fodder grasses dominated in the District.
A concern for pasture improvement and a desire to increase browsing
capacity and quality accompanied sheep diffusion.
While oats and hay were favourite cereals sown on stations, by 1862,
some 10,920 m3 of wheat was annually produced in the Warrnambool-
Port Fairy locality. Colonials, however, experimented with cereal crops,
especially wheat, much earlier. By 1839, ‘Merino Downs’ had 3.2 ha of
‘wheat nearly all out in ear and a splendid crop’, and ‘Murndal’ was creat-
ing ‘corn stacks’ in 1841. Wheat was grown and gristed on ‘Goodwood’
in the 1850s, and ‘Mount Hesse’ posted a return in 1861 of 3.64 m3 of
oats on 2.0 ha, 0.76 m3 of barley on 0.6 ha, and 30.6 tonnes of hay on
5.6 ha on a total of 18.7 ha of cultivated land. Lucerne and barley were
experimented with on ‘Dunmore’ in the 1840s and 1850s. Around Mt
Shadwell, in the 1850s, farms produced 1.4–1.8 m3 of wheat on average
lots of 0.5 ha (with land prices from £10 to £20 per ha) and shipped the
grain to Ararat for milling. ‘Trawalla’ was also planting wheat in 1840 to
reduce pastoral operating costs given the price of flour was at £82 per
tonne. Experiments with ‘wheat on a large scale’ were undertaken at
‘Baangal’ influencing other local cultivation attempts. On ‘Berry Bank’,
oats, barley, and wheat were cultivated in the 1850s and 1860s.
Experiments were undertaken unsuccessfully with tobacco in 1863 but
successfully with lucerne and rape in 1866. On ‘Titanga’, ‘no more than
ten per cent [of pastures were] under crop at any one time’. Grain was
first harvested on ‘Glenormiston’ in the Summer of 1840, producing
‘Four stacks Wheat, one Small Stack Oats and a small one of Barley’. In
the 1850s, ‘Golf Hill’ regularly sowed oaten hay, oats, and barley, before
replacing these with lucerne.
* * *
Pasture improvement was deemed necessary during this phase to

improve the fodder available to better nurture quality fleece. Although
228 D. S. Jones
native grasses survived in many station paddocks up to 1900, intro-

duced exotic grasses were deliberately experimented with to supple-
ment and potentially replace native grasses, and to increase sheep
carrying capacities. ‘English grasses’, perennial Rye Grass and White
Clover, were commonly sown.
As early as the late 1840s, one squatter at ‘Larra’ was walking the
landscape, ‘scraping with his heels in the bare earth between the tufts of
native grasses and dropping seeds by the handfuls [that] he always car-
ried loose in his pockets’. At ‘Mount Hesse’, experimental pastures of
clover, Rye Grass, and lucerne were sown in the 1860s. ‘Ryegrass with
oats’ and a paddock of clover were sown at ‘Barunah Plains’ in 1862, but
‘unfortunately the natural fertility of the soil was not high enough to
sustain these pasture species until the advent of superphosphate’ in the
1920s. Phosphorus, nitrogen, and sulphur, in natural state, were the key
elements deficient in soils and directly affected plant nutrition and
growth. Only in small areas were introduced grasses successful. Grass
seeds were being sown on ‘Eumeralla’ in 1842, and by the 1850s,
‘Dunmore’ ‘was surrounded with lawns of English grass’, including a
croquet lawn and ‘beds of English flowers’. On ‘Wando Vale’ during the
1840s and early 1850s, experiments with various grasses met with mixed
success:
I looked amongst the 37 [native] grasses that formed the pasture of my

run. There was no silk-grass [in 1843], which had been destroying our
V.D.L. pastures … [but it] began to show itself in … patches here and
there [in 1844] … and after all the experiments I worked with English
grasses, I have never found any of them that will replace our native
sward … I had a paddock sown with English grasses … [but] All was car-
ried off by the grubs … [and] Nothing but silk-grass grew year after
year … Dutch clover will not grow on our clay soils; and for pastoral
purposes that lands here are getting of less value very day …
The same difficulties were also experienced at ‘Murndal’ in the 1850s.

By the 1880s, these difficulties appear to have been solved with a grass
seed mixture of Cocksfoot, Rye Grass, Yorkshire Fog, Cow Grass and Rib
Grass. In the mid-1850s, White Clover was sown on ‘Glenormiston’ and
‘The Sisters’ without success. But ‘two hundredweight “using a harrow
before it”’ later produced better results. Thus, ‘the seed does not lose its
vitality in passing through the cattle’s stomachs so that in a few years it
covers the run’.
* * *
Against all the changes wrought on the landscape there were still nature’s
elements to endure. Natural environmental cycles still influenced plant-
ing, harvesting, shearing, and clearing routines. Between 1830 and 1870,
colonials had to face uncertainties and hardships from bushfires, frosts,
droughts, floods, plagues, and landscape changes, the strength and influ-
ence of which instilled a portent fear of the Australian environment.
The Black Thursday fires of February 1851, that became emblazoned
in colonial minds, perpetuated this fear. The ‘heavily vaporous sky …
became lurid and awful’, casting a pall ‘such as may have hung over the
buried cities when the volcano heaved its fiery flood’. Scenes of flames
leaping from tree tops or pacing the wind, are captured in Old Melbourne
Memories (1884), and The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859), recall-
ing harrowing stories of these fires. The ‘Purrumbete’ stock book records
the event in one succinct entry: ‘Feby.—151 Bullocks & Cows melted at
Geelong’.
In 1859, von Guérard painted a scene of terror and violence in Bushfire
between Mount Elephant and Timboon, March 1857 (1859) of vibrant
flames and smoke competing with a full moon. It was to be a continuing
epitaph of the fear and apprehension of self-propelled bushfires in an
‘unconquered’ landscape. Fire was ignited from natural, deliberate, or
accidental circumstances, but its passage wrought pain and damage in the
eyes of colonials who refused to accept it as a natural trait of the land-
scape. It was a fearful scenario ‘when the great grass crop [on ‘Muntham’],
summer ripened, was occasionally ignited in a dry autumn, and like a
prairie fire, swept all before it’.
There were also many smaller bushfires—‘a pillar of smoke by day, and
a pillar of fire by night’. While ‘Mahwallock [“Mawallok”] Run had been
surrounded by fires, but had escaped almost untouched’ in 1851,
‘Ballangeich’ unluckily suffered two devastating fires. In December 1842,
a bushfire swept the ‘Wando Vale’ valley resulting in a paucity of
230 D. S. Jones
thatching reeds but ‘lovely dark green’ grass shoots. Early 1854 witnessed
‘bush fires raging about Black’s Hill [Mt Noorat], Noorat’, and a further
fire razed the locality in 1867. Fires blazed on the hills north of Skipton
and in the Pyrenees over Christmas 1857. In December 1862, ‘a great
bushfire swept’ along the Grange Burn destroying a number of stations.
Fires were deliberately lit in the dense scrub of the Curdies River valley in
1866 to permit exploratory passage. A further fire ravaged some 25,000 ha
of the District landscape in March 1865.
Droughts always accentuated bushfires, and coincidentally the latter
was always followed by heavy rains. As ‘Boldrewood’ recalled:
A fire is not so bad as a drought. A certain destruction of pasture and property

takes place, but there is not the wide-spread devastation among the flocks and
herds caused by a dry season. Heavy rain … afterwards [meant that the] …
burned pastures were soon emerald-green again.
This cycle, recalled in Geoffry Hamlyn (1858), was illustrated in the

1861–1862 drought that was accompanied by bushfires and then the
1862–1863 floods before drought conditions returned. The 1841–1842
droughts that created mirages of a linear bushfire along Fiery Creek were
also followed by heavy rains in 1843. A similar flood-drought cycle occurred
in 1859, and ‘the wet much wanted for the country after nearly six months
of drought’ fell around ‘Wooriwyrite’ after the 1854 fires. The Wannon
Valley experienced an ‘extraordinary drought’ in late 1837, and a drought
continued around ‘The Sisters’ locality after the 1851 fires: ‘The water is
almost done. Many of the cattle have stuck in the mud while attempting to
reach it’. This drought broke in July–September 1851 with the ‘wettest
season within the memory of man’, only to be followed 10 years later by
another drought when ‘the face of the country became absolutely black.
Dams and creeks dried up so that poor animals could get no water’.
On ‘Purrumbete’ the ‘wettest season’ came in the Winter of 1852,
causing Lake Corangamite to rise 3.6 m that winter and spring, and Lake
Colac to overflow into Calvert Lough and the Barwon. On ‘Wooriwyrite’,
the Winter of 1853 was wet and dismal; ‘weather very tempestuous’,
causing flooding on Mt Emu Creek through to October, only to be fol-
lowed by an equally wet Winter in 1854. Mt Emu Creek witnessed many
floods and regularly inundated Skipton in September. Spring 1858 was

also extremely wet on ‘Purrumbete’ as ‘84 Allowed for deaths in the herd
in the six months, having had a great number Boged [sic] in the Swamps’
was annotated as an operational deduction.
If it wasn’t a fire, or a drought, then it was a severe frost, a plague, or
erosive forces. In 1844, Blackwood and Golden Wattles in Wannon
Valley experienced severe frost burn, killing many. Only a few recuper-
ated after a fire burnt the area three weeks later. Reports of plague, espe-
cially rust, were linked to fresh plantings of wheat and oats. These reports
also correlate to the incidence of tree removal. Caterpillars attacked wheat
and oat crops at ‘Glenormiston’, ‘Konawarren’, ‘Merrang’, and the fields
around Port Fairy, in the summer of 1841–1842. Caterpillars again rav-
aged wheat and oat crops in December 1859, and in 1863. Then the rust
disease disastrously affected the wheat crops of 1863–1864: ‘No corn
could properly open, rust came on the wheat, caterpillars destroyed the
oats, and the seed planted for potatoes rotted in the ground’.
There are few reports about soil erosion due to landscape management
changes. ‘Wando Vale’ experienced landslips and increased stream ero-
sion in the 1840s and early 1850s:
The ground … has cracked in all directions, and the clay hills are slipping in
all directions; also the sides of precipitous creeks—long slips, taking trees and all
with them. When I first came here, I knew of but two landslips … now there
are hundreds found within the last three years.
Gullies and depressions became rutted from constantly used dray

tracks and clay cracking. Around ‘Mount Sturgeon’ the plains were ‘full
of airpits like tunnels and where if a horse put in his foot he would fall to
the shoulder’. Most of this erosion could be attributed to defoliation and
concentrated hoofed trampling that increased surface runoff and ground
water seepage. Sheep trampling naturally fallowed and consolidated soils,
disrupted grass swards, and decreased soil moisture retention levels
thereby increasing water runoff. Sheep at ‘Muntham’ were already wear-
ing ‘terraces of steps’ on the hills by their ‘perambulations’ by 1857. They
also devoured roots, shoots, and feasted on banksia foliage: ‘This species
is low and thin and is fast decaying … and will ere long be like other por-
tions, treeless’.
232 D. S. Jones
5.6 Land of the Hunt

See how lively it looks; how bright, yet gentle, is its eye; what a fine frame,
square, deep and compact, yet how light and active is its carriage. How beauti-
ful and even is its fleece, covering the whole body from eye to hock … Open the
fleece in any part, it is free, bright, and closely set on. It has every quality that
can be desired for beauty and profit; it is, in fact the Pure Australian Merino.
Thomas Shaw, Snr., The Australian Merino, 1849
* * *
For colonials, the landscape was one of plenty. ‘What glorious times I
had, gun in hand, or with our three famous kangaroo dogs, slaying the
swift marsupial’. A boundless garden availed itself for the hunt.
Figures 5.7 and 5.8 depict the places and Selected Runs mentioned in
this section.
In the colonial wake, sheep, horses, cattle, and other animals were
introduced to fulfil daily and recreational needs. Sheep dominated the
new relationship with landscape. To Aboriginals, what animals that
grazed on their landscape were part of their dietary plate, although some
retribution was later evident. Native fauna, especially dingoes, kangaroos,
emus and cockatoos, were added to colonial menus and fulfilled ‘aristo-
cratic’ leisure pursuits. Introduced fauna and avifauna soothed the pangs
of homelessness providing both melody and kinship. Animals also
acquired a symbolism peculiar to this landscape. These five aspects are
explored in this section. In a continuous theme between 1800 and 1900,
the landscape remained a haven for the hunt shifting subtly from a suste-
nance to a recreational-monoculture function. A blurring of the two
functions is evident in this phase.
* * *
While the functional justification of colonial expansion was land, the

motivation was driven by the economic gains to be derived from the
fleece. With sheep came other animals, but it was the singular pursuit of
the mythic ‘golden fleece’ that controlled the colonial presence.

234
D. S. Jones
Fig. 5.8 Selected runs

Flocks were first moved from Portland into the vales of the Glenelg
and Wannon in August 1837. Flocks were also driven through the
Warrion Hills and around Lakes ‘Korangamite’ and Gnarpurt to the
‘Plains of Promise’, up the Leigh River valley to the foothills of Mt Misery,
south-westerly along ‘Mitchell’s Line’ to those ‘verdant plains, as yet
untouched by flocks or herds’, or across the ‘wastelands’ from Port Phillip
to Adelaide. In essence, pastoral settlement was not an orderly spread
from Portland but ‘a growth of connections between three main nuclei’.
By 1839, there were at least 70,226 sheep in the District, west of Geelong.
Pastures, adequate water, and a prospect initially determined home-
stead sites. Pastures were undefined, heat and silence intolerable, ‘blacks’
a nuisance, isolation daunting, dreams immense, yet through it all ‘the
rhythmic processes of lambing, washing and shearing had to continue’. A
concern for selective breeding required that ewes and rams were not
mixed in flocks and that lambing strain be minimised. ‘Yearly lambing,
usually in the spring, replaced the old system of rapid breeding, and the
lambs were weaned at five or six months instead of at twelve’. Such a regi-
men demanded multiple flocks, and strategic shepherding, to ensure
purity. Wool merchants also encouraged that
the utmost attention [be] exercised in washing their Flocks, and of their Fleeces
being packed for the London markets free of the coarser parts, and divested, as
much as may be possible, of all soil, impurity, and damaged locks.
Selectivity and market demands resulted in washing innovations, new

methods for wool baling, the advance of the bullocky in moving bales to
ports, and painful experiments in treating diseases such as scab, foot-rot,
catarrh, and pleuropneumonia. Scab, in particular, was ‘a word of dread
and hatefulness, herald of ruin and loss, of endless torment to all con-
cerned, of medicated drippings, dressings, deaths and destructions
innumerable’.
Cattle, particularly bullocks, closely followed flocks. Finding suitable
pastures in the rich plains around Lakes Keilambete, Colongulac, and
Purrumbete, cattle were broken-in and bullocks were kept for heavy
work. Cattle, initially kept for dairy purposes, functionally changed as
meat prices soared during the gold rushes of the 1850s. Beef later achieved
236 D. S. Jones
profitability when successful curing and freezing methods permitted

exportation to Europe.
Shorthorns [Durhams] were highly sought after. On a station, ‘two or
three Pure Bred Durham Bulls of first rate quality’ for breeding herds
were much prized and were often featured in paintings. Robert Dowling’s
Jeremiah Ware’s stock on Minjah Station (1856), Thomas Flintoff’s Henry
F. Stone and his Durham ox (1887), and Eugen von Guérard’s two pastoral
paintings co-titled Koort-koort-nong homestead, near Camperdown, Mt
Elephant in the distance (1860), that celebrated ‘Master Butterfly’, are
illustrative of this preoccupation.
Squatters, shepherds, stockmen, and bullockys also brought with them
trusted dogs, ‘usually rough-haired Scottish collies’, pet parrots, horses,
turkeys, and fowls. Dogs were an essential animal. They hunted for food,
warned of Koories, fought off dingoes and quolls, and were an instru-
ment of the ‘hunt’. At ‘Spring Creek’, a shepherd kept a large pack of
dogs for hunting both kangaroos and ‘natives’. Horses were a mainstay
for a sheep-walk, a necessity for a hunt, and later much prized for stud
racing and export. Travelling with a recently arrived squatting family in
1839 to ‘Trawalla’, up the Leigh, ‘were four little dogs … also three cats,
some cocks and hens, and a pair of rabbits; at our back [on the dray] were
three pigs, and some geese and ducks. We were a noisy party; … the dogs
running beside them’.
* * *
In contrast to Aboriginal relationships with their Country, the colonials

established a ‘tradition of violence’ that structured relationships with
native animals. Indignant reactions of ‘outrage’ were provoked by
Aboriginal ‘thefts’ of cattle, calves, sheep, and horses—the ‘theft’ of even
one sheep was deemed ‘outrageous’. Clearly Aboriginals comprehended
that their Country was being taken by occupation rather than by force,
but they questioned why such reciprocity of resource access was not
extended to the animals introduced by squatters. ‘If the European could
take the land, the waterholes, and the food which had previously been
there for the hunting and collecting, then the Aborigines may have argued
that they should treat the Europeans in a similar manner’. The answer to
this dilemma is in the way Aboriginals saw the landscape as their Country:
In the thought … land and water, people and clan are an act of the creator
totem and the mythological ancestors, who always announce in myth and cer-
emony that this is the country of such and such a clan; to expropriate this land
as a conscious act would be impossible.
Clans … [therefore held] religious responsibilities [to ensure] … the perpetua-

tion of species associated with the particular mythic beings linked with that
territory.
Exclusion from their Country was, therefore, an ‘outrage’ to

Aboriginals. Injury inflicted upon one’s clan was returned by an act of
‘reciprocity’, and resources in one’s Country were deemed part of the
communal food reserves. The latter was especially so in times of drought,
such as 1842 and 1844 when ‘The Eumeralla War’ raged.
Aboriginal attitudes to first sightings of these new animals show asso-
ciative linkages to Dreaming ancestors. A terrifying encounter with a
bullock near ‘Spring Creek’ generated a belief that it was a ‘“Muuruup”
with two tomahawks in his head’. A similar apparition probably pro-
tected a cow lost from a stock drive on the upper Wannon in late 1839.
Near Mt Napier, an Aboriginal showed ‘His surprise was great when the
saddle was taken off [a horse]. Had it been part of the horse, his wonder
could not have been greater. Probably, he thought it belonged to the
beast’. Reactions to woolly flocks traipsing through their Country pro-
voked uncertainty, as one overlander wrote: ‘The natives were pretty
numerous around the mount [Emu] as the party passed and did not seem
too pleased to see them’. Aboriginals were obviously there, and watching
invisibly within the landscape, wondering about these strange new beasts.
It was, however, the ‘outrageous’ incidents of sheep stealing and their
‘wanton’ killing that enraged squatters. They resulted in ‘nothing but
“bouncing” [bragging]’ reports, and exaggerated squatter and newspaper
claims of sheep stealing, as well as other stock that were found killed, and
their ‘wanton’ deaths. Aboriginals
238 D. S. Jones
enjoined … to steal sheep no more, for if they did the white people would shoot
them and then they would all be gone and then when I or any person belonging
to me came again there would be no black fellow.
In 1839, there were ‘at least 70,226 sheep’, but by July 1845, 2680
horses, 64,747 cattle, and 1,058,366 sheep grazed in the District. Their
presence, as commodities in colonial eyes, was deemed by Aboriginals as
constituting part of their communal food resources. ‘Natives rushed
Burns flock and succeeded in getting 3 sheep’ for food.
There were 601 fine ewes … all dead; some skinned; others skinned and quar-
tered; some cut open and the fat taken out and piled in skins [as practised with
kangaroos caught], but most of them just knocked on the head with a stick [as
one would a kangaroo]; meat, fat, and all mixed with the fine sand of the
stringy-bark forest.
On the 18th the blacks again attacked the shepherds … and drove off 1,014
sheep … a party went out to recover the sheep, and they described the road as
strewed with dead carcases.
Incidents of small flocks being taken were more common than these
large numbers. The reasons for the ‘wanton’ killing of ewes and rams,
perceived as wasteful maiming and abandonment, may also have been
deliberate acts of harassment and annoyance to colonials, or rituals of
food preparation and storage disturbed in mid-process, raise unanswered
theories. Were these acts expressions of territoriality, the consequences of
food shortages brought on by droughts, or an extension of Dreaming
relationships with the landscape? These questions beg uncertainty as
Aboriginals also successfully managed sheep flocks. They copied, dili-
gently, acts of folding sheep, and were successfully employed as shepherds
and station hands. Yet they did not attack colonials deliberately by force,
as an act of war, or as an act of retribution. In contrast, this relationship
was not extended to fellow Aboriginals who intruded upon their Country
or Country’s.
Superintendent Charles LaTrobe, in 1842, summarised the
predicament:
Situated as you are [in the Port Fairy District], it is far easier to deplore your
losses than to prevent them. The evils you complain of, are those which have
everywhere accompanied the occupation of a new country inhabited by savage
tribes. Even under circumstances far more favourable … I need scarcely remind
you, how little real security has been enjoyed …; the savage tribes are not only
upon our borders, but intermingled with us in every part of this wide district.
The racial violence of the early 1840s, triggered by ‘three bad years’ and
the summer drought of 1842, culminated in ‘The Eumeralla War’. ‘There is
not a pool of water [in 1842], suited for the purpose of a station, of which
they are not bereft’. Violence dissipated after the ‘War’, but erupted again in
the ‘exceptionally dry’ summer of 1844. By this time, many Aboriginals
were seasoned to sheep grazing and homestead practices, thereby enabling
larger flocks, and numbers of horses and cattle to be ‘stolen’.
‘Bulgarrer’ [sheep] would appear to have been viewed as an element of
Country, to be shared as Aboriginals had shared their possessions with
colonials. The passage of time, from 1837to 1845, witnessed dramatic
sheep and cattle number increases, extensive grazing on the staple
Murnong and other tuberous plants, heavy culling of kangaroos and
other animal food sources, prevention of landscape burning practices,
and exclusion from favoured waterholes, eel fisheries, and springs. All of
these forced drastic changes in daily routines for Aboriginals, from com-
plex hunter-gatherers to the idealised nomadic ‘gang[s] of savages’.
* * *
It was the ‘glorious times’ of hunting kangaroo, wallaby, dingo, emu, and
the flocks of cockatoos and ducks, offsetting the endless hours supervis-
ing sheep, that instilled a sense of freedom resulting in a ‘tradition of
violence’:
Here in these wilds reigns the liberty of rags and the freedom of dirt … Here in
fact one feels at liberty—in England, “Cabin’d, Cribb’d, Confined.” Oh, my
dear Sir, Australia is the land of liberty.
The ‘times’ began with the need for sustenance, progressed to sport
game, and then in later years developed into a ‘pleasurable’ means of
240 D. S. Jones
eradicating ‘pests’. In ‘a clear flowry [sic] country … [where] the ducks

gambolled in flocks and stood two or three discharges before flying’ one
could eat ‘rosted’ birds, ‘stew a duck’, or chase ‘roos’ and emus for their
meat, during the early 1840s to 1860s. The latter ‘chase’ acquired a dis-
tinctively Australian character:
About one hundred horsemen assembled … to witness the destruction of about

1,000 kangaroos, … A paddock of about 1000 acres [405 ha] containing the
kangaroos was partly surrounded by the riders, in companies of twelve, … who
drove the kangaroos into yards enclosed by posts and rails seven feet [2.1 m]
high … 500 were slaughtered upon this occasion by the riders with waddies,
and many were killed by their running against each other and against the fences.
This carnage, at ‘Glenormiston’, was illustrative of mass kangaroo hunts

at ‘Eumeralla’, ‘Goodwood’, ‘Minjah’, ‘Dunmore’, and ‘Harton Hills’, in
the 1860s. It also mirrors rabbit slaughters in the 1870s and 1880s:
Koort-koort-nong station, organises a ‘rabbit drive’ for my amusement and

edification …
In single file the beaters march along the paddock side until three-quarters of a
mile from the corral they spread out across the end of the swamp, and then, a
few yards apart, advance in a long line, beating the tussocks before them … So
keen is the heart of man to hunt and slay that the kirk even becomes excited,
and throws his waddy at a retreating rodent with a murderous aim … a very
small rabbit with a wild and scared expression in its eyes, runs at me, I make a
stand. The animal is evidently clean daft, terror has deprived it of instinct, and
the bitterness of death is past … [The] Official record—A few hundred rabbits,
two hares, a snake and a bandicoot.
Kangaroo hunting originally started as a sport, but as their numbers

dramatically increased in the 1860s, it was out of fear of competition
with sheep pastures that squatters ‘soon got rid of the pest’. Rabbits, simi-
larly, provided a sport for squatters and visitors until their numbers got
out of control. The meat from both animals also provided an alternative
to the standard menu.
The ethos of the hunt was in both adult and child. Children raided
parrot nests, trapped rabbits and quolls, and domesticated magpies as
pets. Squatters, shooting, ‘killed a brace of spurwinged plovers, a brace of
quail, a snipe and a pig’. They shot at brolgas and cockatoos who raided
corn and new seed, snared or shot ‘Wild Plains Turkeys’, shot at ducks,
Cape Barren Geese, and emus, and laid poison for ‘eagle-hawks’. Only a
few lakes were refuges for ‘a large number of wildfowl, black swans and
ducks, whom we now see sailing about in peace and safety, the swivel-gun
fiend having been abolished’.
Animals provided a vernacular menu. Parrot pie was a favourite at
‘Trawalla’:
Parrots are very good eating; many a parrot pie we had. The white parrots are
I think, the best; next, the white cockatoo …. On New Year’s day 1841 …
what good things we had in the bush. We had kangaroo soup, roasted turkey
well stuffed, a boiled leg of mutton, a parrot-pie, potatoes, and green peas; …
Birds and fauna also became pets. In Geoffry Hamlyn (1859):
The [magpie] bird thus alluded to [on the verandah] broke into a gush of
melody, so rich, full, and metallic, that they both turned to look at him … he
began dancing, crooning a little song to himself … And lastly he puffed out his
breast, put back his bill, and swore two or three oaths …
Some species were also greatly admired. ‘It is a beautiful sight to see a
number of emus running across a plain’; there were ‘many beautiful
birds … particularly parrots and cockatoos’ around ‘Trawalla’.
Of the native fauna, the dingo was vehemently hunted. A bounty of 5
shillings was quickly gazetted by the authorities. Their ‘mournful howl
breached the evening’ silence, and ‘mangled carcases and tufts of blood-
ied wool’ denoted their wake. While innovative devices were constructed
to deter them, only the hunt was perceived as the ultimate weapon in
culling this animal.
* * *
242 D. S. Jones
While many animals were hunted, many were also imported to allevi-
ate the perception of silence,
In lands where bright blossoms are scentless,

And songless bright birds.
An ironic overture to imported British songbirds,
those delightful reminders of our early home … the plains, the bush and the
forest … have had their present savage silence, or worse, enlivened by those
varied, touching, joyous strains of Heaven-taught melody which our earliest
records show have always done good to man.
Blackbirds, starlings, skylarks, and thrush were released with melodi-

ous aspirations. Ornamental White Mute Swans joined native Black
Swans on homestead lakes. Deer grazed pastures, fish were bred, espe-
cially at ‘Ercildoune’, for river and lake introduction, peacocks frolicked
on homestead lawns, and the rabbit and hare were introduced for ‘sport’.
The rabbit remains the most frightening import, given the havoc subse-
quently wrought.
5.7 ‘Light on the Iron’

All the way up we had real Australian weather warm and bright and cloudless
the sea really blue not like the pea soup Colored water in Europe—and on shore
densely timbered hills rising tier after tier stretching away inland till the eye is
arrested by the great dividing range. I wish you could see the Coloring of such a
scene under an Australian sky. Italy itself could only furnish hard Cold Colors
in Comparison …
Letter, c.July 1, 1878, Walter Manifold to Augusta Maunsell
* * *
The symbol of a lone horseman in search of ‘that pastoral Eden, the gar-
den of Australia’ is emblematic of squatting upon the Australian
landscape. Blinkered by the dream of the golden fleece, the colonial also
experienced a landscape fraught with unusual silence and solitude, pro-
voking longingness and contemplation. This setting inspired ‘grotesque’
and ‘melancholy’ realms and features that were accentuated by haunting
sounds at night. A colonial expressed these insights and responses in artis-
tic and literary directions, using a vocabulary of ‘sublimity’ and ‘strange-
ness’ in highly descriptive prose and oils. Though things were unfamiliar
compared to ‘thickly-verdured English meadow[s]’, or ‘alien to the con-
stitution’, colonials still surveyed the freedom of these new domains as if
‘possessed [with] the prophetic eye’.
All these progressive wonders were to be evolved from the lone primeval waste
upon which a solitary horseman then gazed in the autumn of 1844. And the
wand of the squatter sorcerer was to do it all. I might then have seen lakelets
glittering in the sun, orchards and cornfields, barns and stables, mansion and
offices, a village in itself, the spacious wool-shed, the scientific wash-pen, had I
possessed the prophetic eye. But Fate held her secrets closely then as now. Only
the vast eucalyptus forest, stretching unbroken to the horizon, waved its sombre
banners before me. Only the scarce-trodden meadows of the waste lay unfed,
untouched around me.
This section explores the landscape imagery created in the path of the
‘wand of the squatter sorcerer’ to explain these unfamiliar environments.
Their responses and perceptions include literary and artistic traces that
celebrated the landscape and perpetuated myths about the Districts’
power and cultural symbols.
* * *
Two predominant art styles characterised this phase. Imposing panora-

mas of colonial settlement in pastoral views, and romantically pictur-
esque and sublime subjects in unique geological settings. In both of these
themes, Eugene von Guérard excelled in the mid-1850s to the late 1860s.
The two themes, of pastoral landscapes and Aboriginal Arcadia, were in
irreconcilable conflict. Von Guérard, however, managed to keep them
apart on his canvases, permitting only subtle signs of intrusion into their
244 D. S. Jones
respective domains. A subtle use of symbols—birds in flocks or in isola-

tion, dramatic and bucolic skies of early morning or late afternoon, or
soft sunset light, curiously dead or truncated trees, sweeping leafage in
primeval ‘wilderness’ splendour, or the juxtaposition of man as an expres-
sion of the universal scene—added spiritual depth. Romantic traditions
of seventeenth-century landscape art and myth, and Humboldtian con-
cerns for botany and geology, underpinned this philosophical approach.
Every landscape [by von Guérard] is an accurate portrait of the scene it pro-
fesses to pourtray [sic]; every tree and flower has not merely its local character,
but its botanical peculiarities; and yet the whole is a picture in the fullest sense
of the word, and a fine picture.
In hindsight, he reflected that his ‘Australian subjects for pictures are

only appreciated by those who have seen that country, or who have at
least an interest in it’. Notwithstanding this, he still sought to give ‘a
glimpse of … divine poetical feelings’ in each image. Two red parrots
inhabited Warrenheip Hills near Ballarat (1854) recalling a ‘wonderful
walk’ in those Hills when he ‘saw many magpies, black cockatoos, par-
rots, etc.’. An introduced fox stalked native kangaroos in ‘the utter loneli-
ness’ of the sublime Mount William from Mount Dryden (1857). Two
senescent trees swayed over a precipice in a melancholy View in the
Grampians (1870). His Victorian geologically inspired sketches were also
used in the Geology of New Zealand (1864), as a comparison of the physi-
cal aspects of both colonies. The signs of intrusion recall his regret at the
pace of forest clearance witnessed near Ballarat where ‘Stretches of fine
forest … [were changed] into desolate-looking bare spaces, worked over
and abandoned’, and were subtly expressed in the powerful scientific
panorama that he recreated in Tower Hill (1855). Influencing these
images was a belief that if these images could serve as ‘delightful illustra-
tions for treaties [sic] of botanical or geological features of the Colony’,
then these landscapes would be better cared for, or ‘be taken equally well
for a misty English or an Australian landscape’.
The sweeping scientific vista of Tower Hill (1855) captures the sublim-
ity of a scene that ‘excells any former production of his … and is in reality
one of the most beautiful landscapes we ever saw’. The primeval scene,
with a serene Aboriginal encampment in the foreground, hidden warn-

ings in the rear, of colonial intrusion by water and smoke, conspired to
create a ‘spiritual vision’ from the landscape. The ‘vision’ remained an
epitaph to the later ‘ruthless destruction of ornamental timber, [where]
the lower portion of the lake … [was] turned into a stinking mud pool’
far from its original sublime ‘wilderness’.
Stony Rises, Lake Corangamite (1857) continued the Aboriginal
Arcadian theme. A serenely domestic encampment, supplied with boun-
tiful food from a hunt, and the brilliance of the soft orange sunset, invited
comparison to the Hudson River School tradition. To travellers, the Stony
Rises ‘in the dim evening twilight have a most unearthly appearance’, and
were a place where ‘a fertile imagination could easily conjure up hob-
goblins, ghosts, & c’. At the Victorian consular Court in London,
however:
It is a greatful [sic] relief to look at some of his pictures here, such as the Stony
Rises and the Fern Tree Gully, after visiting the feverish Turner Gallery, with its
chrome yellow sunsets, dingy azures and so forth. It is one thing to invent
incredible skies and impossible atmosphere effects in a cockney studio; and
another, and a much better thing, to study from nature herself in your
sunny clime.
In March 1857, he sketched numerous landscape features, vistas, and

panoramic station scenes around Camperdown. The Basin Banks, About
Twenty Miles South of Mount Elephant, 1857 (1857) fascinated him. This
relentless horizontal canvas deserved attention ‘not merely as a good
painting, but also on account of its so clearly showing the geological for-
mation of the surrounding country and its volcanic nature’. In the fore-
ground, Lake Gnotuk (1857), with tranquil crater and afternoon sunset
lit clouds, was captured with neighbouring Lake Bullen Merri (1857) in
equally romantic compositions. All three forced the viewers’ gaze in their
subtle displacement of isolated trees as if symbolic of nature’s resistance
to any colonial intrusion. In the tranquil ‘wilderness’ there was also terror.
Bushfire between Mount Elephant and Timboon, March 1857 (1859),
depicted terror and violence in vibrant flame and smoke, taunting the
luminous full moon, but its latency of power overwhelmed von Guérard.
246 D. S. Jones
In contrast, it was the ‘homestead portrait’ that held ‘worthy places in

the homesteads of the squatters’. Capturing tensions between nature and
culture, they transcended topography by positioning features in a man-
ner to impress and express a squatter’s success in property accumulation,
and his acquisition of British pastoral symbols. In a socio-political envi-
ronment, critical of extensive land holdings, it is intriguing that these
pastoral views, depicting flat or undulating unpicturesque subjects,
received scant criticism.
From the Verandah of Purrumbete (1858), with its inventive verandah
framing device documented a tranquil scene of acclimatised plants and
trees, a servant working in the garden, and the creation of a private
aquatic recreation ground. The two horizontal panoramic canvases of
Koort-koort-nong homestead, near Camperdown (1860), and Mt Elephant
in the distance (1860), (one of which posthumously commemorated the
bull ‘Master Butterfly’) continued the approach of ‘homestead portraits’
being contemporary records of created landscapes. As an example, the
strangely monolithic Mt Elephant rose severely in the centre rear of a
wide horizontal canvas that depicted the new homestead and all the out-
buildings of Larra (1857) in an idyllic pastoral scene. The visual manipu-
lation instilled in Lake Bullen Merri (1857) was again applied in
Yalla-y-Poora (1864) where ‘the station nestles in an oasis of greenery …
the grazing flocks, the unruffled waters and the calm luminous sky set a
bucolic mood’. The imputation of full possession and control over land-
scape were implied in these ‘homestead portraits’ that documented
homestead changes, and the acclimatisation diffusion, in imposingly
wide horizontal canvases.
A reviewer of Mount William from Mount Dryden (1857) observed of
this painting that
his skill is of an unusually high degree and a delicate warm feeling. His Mount
William appeared excellent to us and was the most pleasant of his landscapes …
no less is the artist characterized by his gum tree vegetation which almost gives
him that much loved Italian colouring typical of the olive trees.
A fitting review to an artist who, as a young man, admired Claude

Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, and had sketched the volcanic lakes of central
Italy. A similar scene was depicted in View of the Grampians (1870): ‘The
lords of creation are represented by a couple of Aborigines … whose pres-
ence, while it gives life to the scene, is not out of harmony with the pri-
maeval appearance of nature with which they are surrounded’. Precariously
perched, isolated, a band of Aboriginals are positioned confronting the
scenery like explorers surveying an awe-inspiring ‘wilderness’. In both the
pastoral and Aboriginal Arcadian scenes:
His landscapes may not present quite fifteen hundred different grasses as there
are not generally so many to be found in the bush scenes with which his pencil
is familiar, but they offer a minutely laborious description of almost every leaf
upon the gum trees, and of every vein and crevice in the rocks, which would
make them delightful illustrations of a treatise on the botanical or geological
features of the Colony.
During this phase, the artists’ interpretation of landscape remained in

the sublime, in the majestic or the noble, in the mysterious or the
unknown, or in the unfamiliar. It was a ‘literal interpretation, idiomatic
but mannered … distinguished by its fidelity’.
* * *
Poetry, in this phase, depicts the tensions of differentiating to the

European scene, resulting in ‘an obsessive preoccupation with landscape
and description’. There was no easy starting point: the seasons were oppo-
site and bled into each other, native fauna were incomprehensible in their
shapes and colours, landscape forms were stark and cloaked in an ‘ancient
primeval curse’, ‘gnarl’d, knotted trunks Eucalyptian’ shed their ribbons
of bark instead of leaves, and the ‘mysterious sounds of the desert’ all
raised spectres that were glaringly wrong with green familiar Europe. The
dark side of the landscape was portrayed. ‘All creation is new and strange’,
observed Geoffry Hamlyn (1859):
The trees, surpassing in size the largest English oakes, are of a species we have
never seen before. The graceful shrubs, the bright-coloured flowers, ay, the very
grass itself, are of species unknown in Europe; while flaming lories and brilliant
248 D. S. Jones
parroquets fly whistling, not unmusically, through the gloomy forest, and over-
head in the higher fields of air, still lit up by the last rays of the sun, countless
cockatoos wheel and scream in noisy joy, as we may see the gulls do about an
English headland.
‘Gloomy’ settings, with strange birds preaching incantations, gro-

tesque and melancholy tree forms, and silver and red tussock swards,
were starkly dissimilar to those at home. Topographical and environmen-
tal inquisitiveness, once conquered, turned to subtler stanzas that explored
the spiritual and emotional qualities of landscape—the power of nature
upon the imagination that fostered a peculiar sense of place. Influential
in this ‘purple’ ink were ‘Rolf Boldrewood’s ‘ocean of unbroken green-
ery … flame-tinted by the rising sun …’, the ‘vast extent of yellow
plain … [that] quivered beneath a fiery sky’ in Henry Kingsley’s essays, and
the mossy carpet of emerald green,

’Neath the vault of the azure sky;
of Adam Lindsay Gordon, that whispered strains of joy and compre-

hension of the meanings in the new seasons, scents, moods, voices, and
colours ‘in that lost land, in that lost clime’. They represented a commu-
nal struggle to read and expound the new, ineffable tones, shadows,
shades, and sensory nuances in the landscape through prose. Literary
poetics in colonial sensibilities shifted from simple talk to idealised com-
munal possession in the texts themselves, and new signifiers were invented
to typify elements in the landscape.
The aforementioned three descriptive passages about the open plains
repeated other images of endless horizons rolling away into the distance
draped in sere yellows and greys, lack of vegetation, and topographical
power all ‘Neath’ an equally monotonous skyscape. Reds, yellows, blues,
and greens were used as contradictions of the ‘dun grey wolds [which]
rolled off in melancholy waves’—‘the little band of horsemen [on the
plains]—the lowing, half-wild drove—the red-litten cloud prison,
wherein the sun lay dying!’ Two equally powerful horizontal plains suc-
cumbed to endless repetition; juxtaposed in colour and mood, yet similar
in their rolling waves, wraths, and wraiths, they engendered melancholia

in colonial thought. Grasslands, their ‘vaults’ and the homesteads within,
consequently were not sources of aesthetic inspiration in literature.
Rather, they were places one escaped from in favour of diversity, colour,
topography, trees, and the sweet ‘ocean’s breath’.
Chapters in Old Melbourne Memories (1884) by ‘Rolf Boldrewood’
recall experiences and recollections of life between 1844 and 1858, at
‘Squattlesea Mere’ on the lower Eumeralla River. The scenes are primarily
coastal or set in pastures around Mt Eccles—the stage for ‘The Eumeralla
War’—but enter on to the inland plains with stock drives. ‘Squattlesea
Mere’, the reminisced ‘kingdom by the sea’, was a different landscape
from ‘Old Man Plain’. The latter was a place of ‘immense meadows and
gray slopes, thinly timbered with handsome blackwood trees’. But,
There was nothing which some people would consider to be romantic or pictur-
esque in the scenery on which I gazed. But the ‘light which never was on sea or
shore’ was there, to shed a celestial glory over the untilled, unfenced, half-
unknown waste.
Eucalypt forests in those ‘far sun-scorched drought-accursed wilds’

were ‘unbroken to the horizon’, like ocean waves, with their ‘sombre ban-
ners’. The open plains were ‘a trifle monotonous’, but in the ‘dark mid-
night, the intense stillness, broken only by the baying of the dogs … the
“mysterious sounds of the desert”’ controlled the imagination. Skies were
equally gloomy in their ‘sun-scorching’ power, their illusionary deluge of
light and the great clouds of dust in ‘heavily vaporous’ breezes ‘pillar-like
to the clear sky’ that denoted stock-yards of ‘restless, excited cattle … ;
“And the smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever”’. Yet, within these
foreboding scenes, ‘Langi Willi’ was ‘the most perfect place and home-
stead in the West’, ‘Muntham’ was a ‘pastoral paradise of rolling downs,
hill and dale’, and ‘Wando Vale’ was home to ‘great umbrageous
apple trees’.
‘Boldrewood’s “prophetic eye”’ also showed remorse in the legacy colo-
nial expansion would leave on ‘Old Man Plain’:
250 D. S. Jones
There would be roads and cockatoo fences, with obtrusive shingle cottages, and
wheat-fields, barns, and threshing machines—in short, all the hostile emblems
of agricultural settlement, as it is called.
‘I like it not; I would the plain hay in its tall old groves again’.
The symbol of ‘Old Man Plain’ is encapsulated in a stanza from The

Bushman’s Lullaby where:
We have toiled and striven and fought it out

Under the hard blue sky,
Where the plains glowed red in tremulous light,
Where the haunting mirage mocked the sight
Of desperate men from morn till night, -
And the streams had long been dry.
As in Old Melbourne Memories (1884), the story plot of the Recollections

of Geoffry Hamyln (1859) did not linger in prairie-like oceans due to their
absence of picturesque and sublimity. Instead, this landscape stage
bespoke of monotony, mirages of English ‘verdured’ meadows, and con-
templative silence. One looked into the scenes, ‘too lazy to speak, almost
to think’, brooding upon the wide portent ‘painting’, as if ‘rendering the
whole landscape as gray and melancholy as you can conceive’. The ‘gray
plains that rolled away’ was an often repeated literary expression, and
within it lay many apparitions:
We looked across the plain; the stretch of grass I have described was lying before
one like a waveless sea, from the horizon of which rose the square, abrupt-sided
mass of basalt … it appeared a dim mass of pearly gray, but tonight, in the clear
frosty air, it was of a rich purple, shining on the most prominent angles … with
a dull golden light.
‘The more I look at that noble fire-temple, the more I admire it’, said the Doctor
[Mulhaus].
The ‘mirage’ of Mt Shadwell (or Mt Elephant) occurs repeatedly in

story plots as a grey basalt gravestone guarding ‘the vast extent of yellow
plain’. In the darkness, ‘all those thousand commingled indistinguishable
sounds … in the deep stillness’ of the plains were chilled by the ‘monoto-
nous cry’ of ‘a morepork’. And above, watching, was a ‘blue cloudless
heaven’ casting a ‘soft gleam of bright hazy distance, over the plains and
far away!’ Distance, monotony, greyness, melancholia, the ‘broad well-
grassed plains, marked with ripples as though the retiring sea had but just
left it’, are common literary metaphors of this landscape. They were signi-
fiers that Gordon brought to life in his ‘narrow sensory framework’ that
stressed light, journey, intenseness of landscape, and a love of bush, birds,
and flora.
The literary pathos of the phase, implicit in The Sick Stockrider, Ye
Wearie Wayfarer, or A Dedication, inspired many bush ballads. The for-
mer was symptomatic of the colonial swagman or sundowner, a narrative
of journey and the haunting fear of a lonely death in the bush, whereas A
Dedication was Gordon’s ‘declaration of allegiances’ to his adopted land-
scape. A Dedication was a self-searching realisation of the confusion in
aged colonial minds of longingness for England. Yet, it also captured a
growing awakening to the innate characteristics of this newly adopted
landscape. It represents a symbolically charged allegory of the District’s
colonial landscape. Sun, endlessness, and the sense of place, draped in
reckless independence also pervades other stanzas:
We mustered once when skies were red,

Nine leagues from here across the plain,
And when the sun broiled overhead
Rode with wet heel and wanton rein.
* * *
The ‘glad chirrup’ of the cicada was but one of the sensory traits at play
in the experiential landscape in A Dedication. The poem also caught the
rhythm and ‘ring’ of riding, the ‘chaunts’ of marsh frogs, and the tones of
bush silence. These all tell of the sensations of noise, smell, depth, lack of
day or night that were acute experiential landscape traits to the intruder.
Scents of the bush and plains, quietly shedding their perfume fragrances
to the stock-rider, was a sensory trait readily perceived:
252 D. S. Jones
Lightly the breath of the spring wind blows,

Though laden with faint perfume,
’Tis the fragrance rare that the bushman knows,
The scent of the wattle bloom.
One could sit back ‘and blow the cool tobacco cloud’, as sheep slum-
bered in their folds, or as the stock maintained their ‘continuous lowing
or “roaring” in stock-riders’ vernacular’. At night, ‘the atmosphere was so
amazingly pure’, causing ‘the gum-trees whisper overhead’, their shadows
mocking the white moonshine, with the ‘golden wattles … scenting this
cool, transperent [sic] night’. Those haunting sounds of day and night—
of cockatoos screaming in noisy joy, frogs croaking in creeks, ‘the mourn-
ing reeds’ low sigh’, the ‘rustle of a million crawling things’, and the
constant screams of insects in the ‘plains that glowed red’—provoked
daunting prose:
What spirits wake when earth is still? I hear

wild wood-notes softly swell.
There’s the strange clamour, hoarse and shrill,
that drown’s the bull-frog’s hollow bell;
And there’s the plaintive rise and fall of the lone
Mopoke’s cuckoo-call.
Ah me! how weird the undertones that thrill my

wakeful fancy thought!
The river softly creeps and moans; the
wind seems faintly crying too.
Such whisperings seem to come and pass across
the orchis-flower’d grass.
Voices deep in the landscape cast haunting spells with their ‘moans’,
‘wails’, ‘crys’, ‘weird yells’, and ‘screams’. The dreariness of a gloomy
monotonous setting accentuated these feelings and sensations. The sub-
tleness of scents whispered past in zephyrs, the ‘thick kangaroo grass
under my feet, quite as thick as an English meadow’, was reminisced
about. A sense of the unknown and unfamiliar watched over colonial
dreams and journeys.
Colours were either ‘brilliant’ or ‘drab’, not harmonious. Positive and

negatives; like ‘“blue and golden days’, and purple-shadowed eves’ of
summer clashed with ‘hodden grey’, ‘dull grey’, and ‘cold grey mist’.
Colours were deep and strong, emphasising distances and bright light.
The ‘hard blue sky, / Where the plains glowed red in tremulous light’
stressed the power of the two horizontal plains. Connected by light, the
‘azure blue’ and the summer reddened Kangaroo Grass opposed each other.
Ribbons of ‘burnt-up banks … yellow and sad? / [with] boughs … yellow
and sere?’ weaved like threads amongst the plains. Colour paraded to
‘clear … eyes’ in the ‘pink and white blossoms’ of Epacris spp., the ‘flaming
lories and brilliant parroquets’ with their ‘bright reflections of crimson and
blue’ in waterholes, or the ‘porphyry water hen, with scarlet bill and legs,
[that] flashed like a sapphire among the emerald-green water-sedge’. Soil,
‘reddish earth’, or ‘dusk and brown’, masked dusty tracks in plains that
changed from ‘green to dull gray’ when ‘deep blue skies wax dusky, and the
tall green trees grow dim’. Colour was more acute, perhaps intensified by
the light. It rose in the wake of Gordon’s ‘blue burnish’d resistance’, in ‘bril-
liant’, ‘flame-tinted’, ‘flaming’, or ‘hodden’, ‘leaden’, or ‘sere’ shades, that
were reported as ‘tremulous’, ‘strangely lit’, or ‘misty glare’ phenomena.
Colour and sound became an armature of landscape unfamiliarity that
assisted in expressing descriptive scenes of gloomy strangeness. Latently
alluding to the perceived ‘timelessness’, metaphors and signifiers were
used in descriptive dichotomies to explain the nexus of ‘beauty and ter-
ror’ in the landscape.
* * *
In both The Sick Stockrider and A Dedication there is a prophetic sense of

destiny touched by feelings of fearlessness and despondency. Moods of
pace and colour vanish into gloomy and dark tones in their finality.
‘Sickly shadows’ were cast over colonial life, like a pall, and graves blos-
somed triumphantly with bush flowers. Or life was consummated after
inhabiting the ‘dreamiest distance’,
Some in song in all hearts hath existance, -

Such songs have been mine.
254 D. S. Jones
These are scenes of fatalist reflection and conclusion, at the end of joy-
ous independent lives on the plains. It is a tone that wafts in The Bushman’s
Lullaby through the authors’ self-questioning of his landscape allegiances,
and it is a note indelibly sketched in von Guérard’s canvases about the
tensions of colonial expansion. What was the colonial prospect, or vision
of a future? How did one ably express ‘divine poetical feelings’ to land-
scape or place? Was a transect of time, or an allegory of life’s journey, the
answer in a landscape that was tormented by all that was opposite to
those in Europe? The way to breach these scenes, evidently, was to layer
descriptive prose and scientific documentation in the hope of unlocking
hidden secrets that would enable a comprehension of this environment.
Within these attempts, however, romanticism, sublimity, ‘English’ tenac-
ity, tradition, and a pervading freedom of independence directed thoughts
and reactions to landscape. A dark side was easily portrayed because it
was the most blatant to view and sense. It beheld ‘beauty and terror’,
together, grasping at the screaming joy of white cockatoos as a metaphor
to explain the landscape making it come to life. Operating negatively and
positively, the literary and illustrative sketches produced a sense of place
borne in ecological self-adjustment to a new environment.
The open plains landscape accentuated this dilemma—of foreignness
and monotony. It was one in which the essences were difficult to encapsu-
late except by deviating off into scenes of stock drives, rutted liquid mud
roads, promising homesteads, or sites of greater topographical interest and
novelty. These aspects were much easier to describe or explain than the
sheer vastness of what lay under ‘the sky-line’s blue burnish’d resistance’.
* * *
5.8 Noontide Tapestry

These comprise, for Domains: a European system of cultural rules and
traditions about land was quickly transposed upon this landscape and
progressively modified to suit colonial objectives. Prescribing ownership
responsibilities, spatial arrangements of land holdings, and boundary

demarcation approaches, it readily established a secure backbone to colo-
nial land relationships; boundaries were distinctively etched or erected on
the ground surface, often as lines joining and following natural and cul-
tural features or corridors, using available natural resources; space was
treated as singular and materialistic, and divided to fulfil economic objec-
tives and functions relevant to the production of sheep; ‘title’ to land was
validated by paper-based descriptive referent; neutral spaces and corri-
dors were progressively resumed to permit communal meeting points and
settlements, to assist passages through the landscape, and to conserve
some environmental resources as communal assets; runs formed units
analogous to Aboriginal spatial Country’s in terms of size and self-
sufficiency requirements, yet this system was un-comprehended by colo-
nials; naming features and spatial arrangements on the landscape enabled
colonials to assert control and possession over the space, and to introduce
a new set of meanings or associations to designated points; landscape
surveyors used names like reference co-ordinates to locate and define
spaces created on paper; and, Aboriginal etymology was readily seized by
colonials and transplanted to define their spaces and points (especially for
run, parish, and place names).
For Pathways, traits evident are: journeying through the landscape was
essential to discover its qualities and to lay claim to its resources. But it
was often a lonely activity allowing the great expanse to infuse contem-
plative and self-questioning thoughts into the minds of travellers; roads
were extremely important in the conveyance of information and goods,
but also acted as umbilical connexions with fellow colonials, assisting the
flow of European culture, thereby reducing their sense of isolation; hav-
ing been carved by man and beast, pathways were recognisable tracks
delineated by mud, dust, and ruts that wandered aimlessly through the
landscape of which distinctively these routes were generally east-west
across the open plains, in contrast to natural corridors and the main
Aboriginal routes, thereby prolonging the sense of monotony and isola-
tion; and, pathways interconnected homesteads and places of settlement,
and facilitated the conveyance of flocks and herds, fleeces, food stuffs,
news and information between these points, and campsites, fords and
distinctive features along the way became symbolically charged as poten-
tial meeting places with other travellers.
256 D. S. Jones
For Gathering Places, traits evident are: there is a strong correlation

between Aboriginal and colonial site selection of places for daily living
activities and recreational pursuits; places for daily living: homesteads
were often strategically located for view, water, and shelter needs at junc-
tures in micro-environments, enabling easy access to a range of food and
fodder resources, and timber supplies, to facilitate construction activities;
places of spiritual meaning: these points were created by incident and
chance so they occur in more isolated locations unrelated to natural
resources, and were infrequently visited yet held deep symbolic meanings;
places for cultural interaction: these points were located either at crossing
places on perennial streams or springs or at unusual natural features that
were linked to abundant water supplies, and permitted the establishment
of inns and settlements to serve travellers and homestead ‘villages’.
For Shelter, traits evident are: designs for colonial structures explored
the use of timber, bluestone, verandahs, and British stylistic traditions of
architecture in an attempt to realise suitable shelter arrangements and
forms that minimised climatic impacts and provided reasonable human
comforts; Aboriginal structures quickly deteriorated or were destroyed
due to their lightness and fragility of construction; considerable attention
was given to designing and constructing colonial structures that cele-
brated and assisted in the production and shearing of fleece; collections
of either timber or bluestone structures, with differing functions, were
erected around the activity nodes of homesteads, inns, or fords, creating
village-like encampments; building construction relied upon the creative
use of natural resources, progressively shifting from raw materials, to cut
timber, to stone, as construction technologies improved; building siting
displayed a need to locate near perennial fresh water supplies, leeward
shelter, a vantage outlook, and an expanse of arable soil and flat pastures
for flock pasturage, and thereby these sites tended to correlate with
favoured Aboriginal encampments.
For Plants, traits evident are: all vegetation communities were sub-
jected to severe destabilisation through rampant felling and firing, intro-
duction of competitive species, browsing and trampling by hoofed
animals, and the removal of traditional fire regimes; thereby the threat to
the savannah grasslands and open woodlands was more pronounced
because the intensity of pastoral and station development practices
resulted in a decline of summer perennial grasses and fragile upper storey

vegetation; the scale of tree and shrub loss was rapid and extensive, and
established the ‘treelessness’ myth about the landscape; exotic vegetation
was introduced to improve the quality of fodder grasses, to diversify colo-
nial dietary resources, and to embellish homesteads; little regard was
given to the dietary, medicinal, and fibrous properties of indigenous
plants for colonial consumption and artefact fabrication, and thereby
Aboriginal discouragement from continuing natural agricultural prac-
tices, heavy browsing by sheep, and prevention of firings resulted in a
decline in available tuberous food plants and overall native plant germi-
nation; and reduction of Aboriginal firing practices limited bushfire fre-
quency, but increased the magnitude of impacts and the psychological
fear and aura associated with bushfires.
For Animals, traits evident are: the sheep imperative influenced atti-
tudes to the land and elevated the animal to mytho-totemic status, wherein
squatters sought to breed them, protect them from prey and Aboriginals,
expand their pastures, and efficiently shear their fleece; native animal com-
munities were subjected to severe destabilisation through rampant colo-
nial hunting activities, competition with introduced species, and the
destruction of nesting and browsing habitats; colonials used some native
animals to supplement their menus, and also to create symbols out of their
skins and furs; exotic animals were introduced to ‘improve’ the sensory
environment of the landscape, for the joys of hunting and fishing, to assist
the operation of the run, and to diversify the homesteads’ dietary resources;
and the scale of loss is unclear, and as a consequence through the actions
of hunting and tree destruction it appears that small to medium herbi-
vores were more susceptible in this phase, but that kangaroo populations
appear to have increased forcing mass hunts.
For Imagery, traits evident are: an excessive preoccupation with land-
scape and description created a series of paintings, poems and novels that
are more like scientific records in their detail of documentation or their
attempts to explain the qualities and nuances of a scene; paintings, poems
and novels were more often centred upon pastoral icons (homesteads,
woolsheds, sheep, bushfires) and sublime features (lakes, hills, waterfalls)
than explaining the open plains; paintings, poems and novels provided
influential media to elevate both the pastoral icons and their
258 D. S. Jones
representations to mythical status; and, cognitive and experiential read-

ings of the landscape were severely tinted by European notions of aesthet-
ics and Romanticism in art and literature.
* * *
‘Bruni’ (1903): np; Abbott (1880): 97–102; Adamson and Fox (1981):
123–133; Anderson (1969): 7, 17, 31, 62, 110–112; Andrews (1986);
Anon. (1873): 65; Arrowsmith (1853): Map 2; Australian Council of
National Trusts (1983): 216–217; Baillieu (1982): 32, 38; Barnard
(1933): 20; Barnes (1986): 97; Bassett (1954): 396, 406, 408, 425–427,
430, 431, 433–434, 446, 454, 518, 519, 533; Baxter (1970): 395–398;
Beer (1989): 65–66; Bennett (1982): 230–232, 235; Berndt (1964):
258–295; Berndt (1982): 4; Bird (1986): 8, 9; ‘Boldrewood’ (1969): 13,
14, 15–16, 17, 18, 25, 28, 29, 35, 37, 39, 41–47, 61, 84, 88, 91–92, 94,
101–104, 119, 124, 133, 138, 139–140, 149–150, 154, 176, 177, 196,
198; Bonwick (1970): xiii, 9, 10, 12, 20, 22, 28–32, 33–34, 35–36, 37,
38, 39, 40–41, 44–45, 46, 48, 57, 69, 70, 72, 77, 78–79, 87–89, 93,
97–98, 120, 121, 123, 126–127, 128–129, 131, 133, 153–154, 155,
156, 158–159, 160, 161, 162–164, 166–171, 172–173, 174, 175–181,
182, 183–185, fn. 8, 12, 18, 20, 21, 24; Bonyhady (1985): 10, 37, 38,
53–54, 55–56, 77, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 126, plate 4, plate 5; Bonyhady
(1986): 49, 51, 175, 180–183; Bride (1969): 42, 55, 96, 120, 125, 137,
163, 164–165, 167–169, 177, 184–185, 192–193, 268, 336, 394, fn.
11, 13; Brooks (c. 1839); Brown (1935): 222–225, 228, 237; Brown
(1941–1968): Vol. 2, 14–15, 244, 245, 246, 247; Vol. 3, 622–625; Vol.
5, 523; Brown (1987): 6, 12, 32, 52, 68, 99–100; Bruce (1980): 32, 40,
43–48, 49, 54–62, 81, 84, 160; Cabena (1985): 1–8; Cannon (1983):
453; Carter (1911): 14–17; Chapman (1965): 1, 18, 23, 29, 37, 39, 45,
55, 57, 58, 60, 70, 72–75; Christie (1979): 50, 75; Clark and Whitelaw
(1985): 134–135; Clark (1987): 2–18, 110; Clark (1988): 17–18, 19,
20, 22, 24, 25, 47, 82, 83, 84, fn 75; Clark (1989), 16; Clark (1990a):
6–7, 8–14, 62–63, 67, 68–82, 97, 121, 181–183, 238, 239, 253, 265;
Clark (1990b): 67, 68–82; Clark (1990c): 97, 101, 103–104, 108,
111–112, 114, 118, 121; Cole (1984): 16, 18–19; Cole (1991–92):
137–142; Comstock (1974): 96; Conley and Dennis (1984): cover, 16,
17, 18; Connah (1988): 87, 88, 89, 90, 96–100; Cornish (1975): 173;
Corris (1968): 76–77; Coutts et al. (1977): 198–199; Critchett (1984):

12–20; Critchett (1990): 6, 7, 9, 19–20, 23, 24–26, 29, 33, 37–51, 56,
62–67, 77, 78, 86, 90, 91, 95, 96, 97–110, 111, 114–115, 118–119,
120, 121–122, 124, 125, 126, 128–129, 130, 137, 143, 144, 146–147,
151, 152, 153, 156, 160, 162–164, 177–178, 180–181, 184, 188, 189,
237, 238, 239, 242, 244, 245, 249, 252; Dawson (1981), 99, 105–106;
de Serville (1980): 37; Dennis (1963): 66, 99, 140, 145–146; Dixon
(1892), 195–206; Dixon (1977): 274–299; Doolan (1979): 161–168;
Duruz (1974): 12–25; Eccleston (1992); Elliott (1967): 4, 81, 82, 93;
Elliott (1968): 272–276; Everett (1986): Map 2; Faigan (1984): n.p.,
plate 9; Ferguson (1957): 137; Fraser (1981): 3/91, 3/100, 3/102, 3/106,
3/107, 3/120, 3/138, 3/140, 3/158; ‘Garryowen’ (1888), Vol. 2, 360;
Gott and Conran (1991): 1–2, 6; Gott (1983): 2–18; Gray (1977): 25,
211; Gray (1978): 25; Hamilton (1880): 24–26; Hamilton (1892):
178–239; Hamilton (1969): 217, 220, 222; Hansen (1988): 6–7, no. 64;
Hartwell (1954): 110, 114; Hawdon (1984): n.p.; Hay (1981): 2, 3, 11,
12, 14, 23, 24–25, 71; Hodge (1988): 16–17; Howitt (1972): Vol. 1,
53–54; Jellie (1989): 2.511, 2.512; Jones (1969): 224–228; Jones (1984):
59, 205; Jones (1991): 1–29; Kerr (1865); Kerr (1984): 9–16; Kiddle
(1962): 11, 46, 48, 49, 50, 53–55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63–66, 70–75,
78, 80, 81, 84, 85, 88, 91, 95–96, 97, 98, 99, 106, 110–111, 122, 126,
143–144, 163–164, 165–166, 170–171, 177–178, 181–182, 185–186,
194, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 209–210, 226–227, 230–232, 233–236,
241, 265, 266–267, 275, 280, 283, 284, 289–290, 291, 292–293, 294,
297, 300, 302, 304, 305, 307–308, 310, 312, 313, 314–315, 316, 317,
318–325, 327, 373, 380–386, 390, 391, 401–404, 408–410, 411, 418,
424–425, 430, 433, 434, 436, 437, 439, 441, 443, 445; Kingsley (1952):
1, 129, 146–147, 159, 198–202, 221, 238, 241, 243, 271, 295, 303,
321, 323, 346–347, 378, 427; Kininmonth and Kininmonth (1987):
17–23, 40, 46, 126–128; Kininmonth (1984), 41, 91–92, 93; Kirkland
(1969), 176–182, 180, 181–182, 183–185, 186, 187–189, 190,
195–197, 201, 202, 203, 204–209; Kynaston (1981): 144; L.P. Planning
(1980): 35–36, 65–66, 118, 159; Lang (1834): Vol. 1, 354; Lang (1853);
Lawlor (1991): 274–275; Le Souef (1965): 8–29; Leake (1975): 105;
Lewis (1977): 1; Lewis (1985): 4–6, 115–117, 119, 120, 123, 124–125;
Loudon (1833); Lourandos (1976): 183–187; Mack (1988): 62, 81–83,
84, 107, 115; Magarey (1986): 96–97, 112–115; Manifold (1984):
260 D. S. Jones
5–57, 58, 62, 65, 66, 72–82, 83, 85, 97, 128, 130, 133–135, 136, 138,
161, 162, 171, 179, 189, 237, 238; Massola (1966): 128–129; Massola
(1968a): 197–200; Massola (1968b), 317; Massola (1969): 23–24, 40,
44, 45, 46, 48–49, 52, 55, 57, 60; McAlpine (1963): 57; McGregor and
Oaten (1985): 1–2, 7, 10, 12, 37, 91, 94; McLaren (1987): ix–xii, xiv,
14, 16–17, 29, 32, 35, 39–40, 41, 43, 46, 50, 63–72; McLellan (1989):
28, 30; Mellick (1973): 91–94; Mellick (1982): x–xxii; Mellick (1983):
53, 70–74; Miller (1972): 4, 8; Mitchell (1965): Vol 1, 1–7, 40–44;
Mitchell (1965): Vol. 2, 159, 201, 202, 207–211, 213–214, 215, 242,
243, 245, 248, 252–253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261–274,
332, 333, 334; Moore (1959): 503; Moore (1962), 170, 177–178,
180–181; Mortlake Historical Society Book Committee (1985): 5–6, 17,
18–19, 20, 23–26, 39, 45, 64, 57, 126, 154–155, 158, 165; Murdock
(1921): 94–100; Notman (1989): 4–5, 6–7, 19, 26–27, 28, 40–42,
66–67, 95–96; O’Dea (1992), ix–xi; Oldham and Stirling (1969): 31;
Oman and Lang (1980): 1–2, 6, 10, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 17, 22–23, 24,
26, 27, 28, 34, 35–37, 47, 50–51, 82; O’Neill (1993a): 11; O’Neill
(1993b): 11; Opie (1986): 4–5, 11–12; Parker (1849); Parker (1854):
11; Parsons (1973): 68–70, 84–87, 188, 232–235, 235–238, 238–243,
257–260; Patton (1930): 186; Peel (1971): 8, 74–75, 76, 78, 96, 99,
101, 105, 112, 113; Peel (1974): 96, 105; Poulston (1984): 16, 19, 22,
25–26, 27, 28, 33, 52–53; Powell (1968a); Powell (1968b): 59–66;
Powell (1968c): 346, 347, 352, 353; Powell (1969b): 14; Powell (1969a):
22–23; Powell (1970): 34–37; Prentis (1983): cf., 30–31, 81–83, ch. 5;
Presland (1977): 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 9–11, 12–13, 15, 17, 18–19, 21–23, 24,
25, 28–29, 35, 37, 41, 45, 47–49, 51, 53, 54–55, 66, 67, 70, 71–73,
74–75, 76–78, 81–83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 96–97, 111; Presland (1980): 24,
25, 29, 30, 31, 35, 41, 43, 47, 48, 51, 52–53, 58, 59, 60, 62, 65–67, 79,
80–88, 89, 99, 108, 111, 118, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 146, 150–151;
Ramson (1966): 77–90; Ramson (1991): 5, 8, 11–12; Robb (1962),
11–22, 72, 115–116, 119–122, 132; Ronald (1978): 26, 50–53, 68–70,
146; Ross (1911): 60, 61, 64, 65; Rutledge (1965): 110–127; Sagazio
(1989): 20–22; Sagazio (1992): 116–117, 118, 119; Sayers (1972):
13–14, 15, 16, 18; Seaton (1988): 2, 71, 101–104, 112–115; Shaw
(1849): 12–13; Shaw (1860): 27; Shaw (1969): 21, 22–23, 24–25, 27,
32–33, 65–68, 70–73, 78, 80, 84, 88, 95–97, 104–105, 121, 133, 137,
139, 185, 186, 187, 191, 193–194, Fig. 1, plate 3 opp. 65; Smith (1975),
162–164; Smyth (1972): Vol. 1, 128.; Smyth (1972): Vol. 2, 186; Sowden
(1972): 25, 165–169, 184–185, 186–187, 202–203; Spreadborough and
Anderson (1983); Stapylton (1971): 98, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113;
Starforth (1853); Stewart (1975): 87ff; Stuwe (1986): Map 2; Tanner
(1979): 69, 72, no. 92, 98, 99; ‘The Vagabond’ (1981), 61, 63, 72, 80,
87, 88, 89–91, 95–96, 101, 103, 105; Thomas (1869): 62; Thomas
(1988): 40, 50, 62, 81; Tipping (1982): 44, 63; Trangmar (1956): 11;
Trollope (1873), 69; Tunbridge (1987): 2–6; ‘Twain’ (1897): 83–84;
Victoria (1992), 161; Vines (1990): 13, 16–17; Viollet-le-Duc
(1864–1868); Warner (1958): 18–19; Watkin (1911): 89–97; Westgarth
(1888): 45; Whitehead and Whitehead (1986), 43–44, 52–53, 64, 70;
Williams (1984), 173–188; Williams (1987): 314, 316–317; Willingham
(1983): 64, 66, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 84–95, 97, 113, 119–121, 146,
148–150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 179, 280; Willingham (1984): 63–64, 65,
66, 68–69, 70, 71–73, 78; Willingham (1987): 3; Willis (1963): 163,
165; Willis (1964): 398; Wright (1985); Wright (1989): 1–15, 49–60,
53, 56, 57, 58–59; Yule (1988): 30, 35, 38, 40, 53–54, 57, 58, 61.
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6
1860–1900: ‘Sunlit Afternoon’
6.1 Knowing ‘The Land Out There’

Have men building a stone wall along the boundary with Mr. Timms [of
‘Mount Hesse’]. The contracts are for 5½ miles [8.85 km], which is all that can
be done with stones. Mr. McKie is superintending the wood part of the fencing
and has ordered 12,000 stuff [rails] in the Colac forest, there being about 8
miles [12.8 km] to fence with 2 rails and 2 wires. … Have also one party of six
men at work with stone fence on R.W. Holes run, 3½ miles [5.6 km] adjoining
Mr. Bell’s and stuff is being laid down also adjoining Mr. McRobie 2½ miles
[4.0 km] there, all of which is to be done this winter, making for this winter
about 20 miles [32.1 km] of ring fence, a cost of from £110 to £120 per mile.
Diary entry, February 1, 1862, James Kininmonth, ‘Barunah Plains’
* * *
‘The land out there’, by the mid-1870s, was a reconstructed cultural land-
scape. Positions of threads, eminences in the lacework, and spatial con-
figurations had been woven in a series of overlays that enabled a colonial
to know where he was, but not who he was.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_6
274 D. S. Jones
Progressively, a series of intangible enclosure devices partitioned the

landscape. Aboriginal metaphorical and mythical constructions of place
meshed with political agendas and physical forms of spatial enclosure in
redefining the spatial structure of the landscape. Over this time period,
land, in surveyed parcel and lot, was shaped into readily identifiable and
transferable commodities. Spatial management frameworks were erected,
political demarcation structures erected, and a new regime of stations
institutionalised by family inheritance and acquisition were established
across the landscape.
Longevity of occupation also bred internal knowledge of numerous
layers of landscape information. Two traits were common in this time
period. First, a sense of identity to place evolved provoking a need to erect
mental structures to protect this emotive response. Second, specialisation
of crafts prompted the creation of internal knowledge bases that were
localised, regional, or continental. Self-identification reinforced the title
and myth of the ‘Western District’. This notion stimulated a colonial
secessionist ideal, later subsumed in debates over shire council territories.
A layer of scientific linguistics, diffused over the landscape, also sought to
identify the floral, faunal, and geological constitution of the space. In
both instances, the naming of place or object increased the comprehen-
sion of the landscape, by adding further specialist layers of myths, and
stories.
Figures 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 depict the places, the municipal areas and the
road boards, respectively, mentioned in this section.
This section first examines ‘the land out there’. The forms of tangible
and intangible legal boundaries, or their parallel forms, that were erected
upon the landscape, and which hold an enduring power today. Second, it
considers the two identification traits: attempts at colonial secession and
subsequent internal political unit fragmentation, and the expansion of a
specialised lexicon. Increased comprehension of the landscape self bred a
new set of cultural structures that aided the understanding of what was
there and where I am.
* * *
6 1860–1900: ‘Sunlit Afternoon’ 275

276
D. S. Jones
Fig. 6.2 Municipal areas 1900

6 1860–1900: ‘Sunlit Afternoon’
Fig. 6.3 Road board districts 1863. Source: W.S. Logan, “Local Government Boundaries,” 1966
277
278 D. S. Jones
Recognition of a sense of place permits us to dissect an ‘outdoor room’

into constituent parts by varying criteria. It follows also that as landscape
familiarity and comprehension increases the number of mental structures
we devise to fragment it into smaller and more intimate spaces also
increases.
Land delineation in the District was forced on to paper landscapes
only to be dependent upon the quill for depiction. To explain place, or to
‘own’ place, one had to depict in words the boundaries and scope of
place, leading to legal descriptions. The central vehicle for land definition
during the previous time period had been a system of squatting run leases
and General Law titles, but the Real Property Act 1862 changed this
approach. This Act introduced the Torrens System, simplified and facili-
tated land dealings, secured the title, and improved land accessibility. It
also permitted the flexible registration of both Crown grants, in fee sim-
ple, and Crown leases used by squatters and selectors.
Land was inscribed in legal paperwork, thus permitting the easier
assemblage and transferability of stations by squatters and station owners
who sought to increase their domains. As squatters saw their runs disin-
tegrate by survey, ballot, and auction, other squatters sought to stabilise,
increase, or disperse their station holdings across the landscape to better
weather the portentous seasons and variable economic markets. New sta-
tions, created on the back of the golden fleece, cattle or horses, revolved
around family lineage rather than communal groups of citizens. By
December 1862, one could traverse westward from Williams Town
[Williamstown] through the stations of ‘Chirnside’ [‘Werribee Park’],
J. Austin [‘Avalon’], Armytage [‘Wooloomanata’], [a] break of small farms
round Geelong and Barrabool Hills, say 12 miles [19.3km]; then
T. Austin [‘Barwon Park’], Armytage [‘Ingleby’], Calvert [‘Irrewarra’],
Murray [‘Barongarook’], Milner, J. Austin [‘Gherangermarjah’],
Roadknight, Manifold [‘Purrumbete’], N. Black [‘Mount Noorat’],
Moffat [‘Chatsworth House’], Gray [‘The Gums’], Skene, Harding
[‘Devon Park’], S.G. Henty, Cameron, Moffat’s old station, Cameron,
S. Winter [‘Murndal’], McLeod, F. Henty [‘Merino Downs’], E. Henty
[‘Muntham’], Murray. This gives 24 stations in about 240 miles [386.2
km], and on it, there are only a few groups of farmers, say Barrabool and
Geelong, Colac, Camperdown, Hexham, Hamilton.
Families, owning fragmented portions of the landscape mosaic, estab-

lished a pastoral heritage that continued into the twentieth century.
Names of Chirnside, Armytage, Austin, Calvert, Manifold, Black, Gray,
Henty, Cameron, Winter and Cooke, Millear, Currie, Beggs, Russell,
Dennis, Ritchie, Kininmonth, Ware, and McKinnon established tradi-
tions and lineage supplanting the lost clans of Djab wurrung,
Wadawurrung, Gunditjmara, Jardwadjali, Girai wurrung, Djargurd wur-
rung, and Gulidjan. Taking responsibility for land management, they
established a new set of land-based traditions that matured into a set of
myths during this time period, which continue today.
* * *
By about 1865, the District landscape had been extensively subdivided

by often invisible survey lines on paper running relentlessly north-south
and east-west. Surveyors had spent months in the field triangulating the
space, pegging geometric junctures, recording endless calculations, before
returning to tent and drawing board to recapture the divisions and spaces
on parchment. A new mosaic of geometric space identification that relied
upon numerical and appellation codes rather than place names and song-
lines was laid upon the surface and on paper. Foundations for fence posi-
tions were marked by pegs, and each boundary was clearly delineated in
geomagnetic co-ordinates permitting only occasional convolutions by
nature’s tracery. These legal edges established the bounds of resource har-
vesting, cultivation, and grazing activities. Upon this mosaic, a further set
of invisible lines was imposed in this time period by further land selec-
tions, the creation of road boards and their successor Shire councils, and
the drawing of coloured railway reserves, like linear octopus tentacles,
across the colony.
The Land Amendment Acts 1865 and 1869 sought to resolve the
‘dummy’ system of land acquisition permitted under the Orders-in-
Council 1847 and past Land Acts 1860 and 1862. They also provided
scope for greater opportunities and equity in land selection by permitting
applications for 129.5 ha allotments, before or after survey, and increased
flexibility in land clearance and cultivation requirements. By these dates,
also most grazing land in the District had been alienated limiting
280 D. S. Jones
selection opportunities to heavily forested or potentially non-arable land,

such as in the Heytesbury forests, lands around Naringal, Purnim and Mt
Eccles, the sandy thickets of Follett County, or the upper reaches of the
‘Red Gum Country’ ‘forest lands and bleak and barren heaths which ren-
der agriculture costly, difficult and not over-remunerative’.
Selection was thwarted by the luck of the draw and inhospitable hard-
ships, unlike the previous time period. One selector, from ‘Greenhills’,
complained in 1872 that
having selected fifty acres of land which for the greater part of the year is covered
with water, I wish to know whether I may be allowed to select again, the above
land being quite worthless.
Another complained that of 113.7 ha, the land was ‘so wet and poor’
that it prevented crop and cereal germination. Near Timboon, selectors
along Curdies River in 1877 found extensive thick forests to clear, requir-
ing the ‘marking of trees, so as to find my way back’ out of the timber,
before land could be cultivated. A simple dray access track of 3.2 km with
two bridges into a selection ‘took us over a month … [of ] falling large
gum trees’.
Selection required improvement works to the value of £1 per acre to be
undertaken within two years to ensure granting of the right of acquisi-
tion. Initially, improvements involved fencing the selection before any
clearing and cultivation could start. A dwelling structure also had to be
erected to satisfy a residency requirement. Such conditions, given the
quality of the allocated land, prompted part-time farming activities or
agricultural cooperatives. Examples of the later evolved in the Moravian
communities of Tabor and Hochkirch (Tarrington) in 1853, and ‘home-
steading’ initiatives from 1891 to 1913 near Coleraine, Casterton and
Branxholme, as radical solutions to urban unemployment problems,
assisted by the Settlement on Lands Act 1893.
The underlying socio-political agenda for closer settlement of the
District, beginning with squatting between 1830 and 1870, was enshrined
in land acts. This agenda continued into the 1930s notwithstanding the
landscapes’ reluctance to accept the intensity of ‘stewardship’ activities
compared to natural agricultural practices under Aboriginals.
An invisible layer of political boundaries was also placed upon the

landscape. While electoral legislation dissected space into ‘representative’
voices, they were minor compared to the impact of the Road Board Act
1853, replaced by the Road Districts and Shires Act (1863), creating road
boards, then Shire councils with jurisdictional scope over townscape,
social service provision, segregation of environments, and the construc-
tion of infrastructure.
Large Road Board units, focused upon Portland (1856), Warrnambool
(1854), and Belfast [Port Fairy] (1853), progressively devolved into
smaller units. Citizens and station villages fought for increased local rep-
resentation, voices, and control over their landscape. These voices resulted
in the present pattern of invisible political units, albeit later boundary
squabbles and excisions. The Shires of Glenelg (1864), Wannon (1872),
Dundas (1863), Ararat (1864), Ripon (1863), Grenville (1864), Colac
(1864), Hampden (1863), Mortlake (1864), Leigh (1864), Warrnambool
(1863), Mount Rouse (1864), Minhamite (1871), Belfast (1863), and
Portland (1863) were created like political clan Country’s with a com-
mon political language: to assert a managerial control over changes and
improvements to the landscape. Each unit focused around a semi-urban
node in the landscape and expressed the political determinancy of the
inhabitants within that unit. Continued self-determinist sensibilities
caused internal secessions forcing the creation of Wannon (1872),
Minhamite (1871), and Heytesbury (1895) shires, and the Borough of
Koroit (1870).
A further illustration of this assertiveness was the ‘Princeland’ secession
movement. Commonality of landscape issues, and spurned ‘political
crumbs that fall from the overloaded government tables’, prompted a
push for self-identity. The movement, from much of the District and
south-eastern South Australia, to collectively secede from their colonies
and establish the ‘Princeland’ colony in the short term proved unsuccess-
ful. Acceptance of the entity brought to a head the need for parochial
urban-based colonial governments in 1862 to expend increased revenues
in this landscape to pacify separatist enthusiasms.
This motivational raison d’être, in a common destiny, continued
throughout this time period raising its spectre again in the Federal
Constitution Referenda of 1898 and 1899. While colonial unity
282 D. S. Jones
euphoria, and the desire to remove inter-colonial trade barriers, gathered

much support in the District, increased self-consciousness appears also to
have played a role. An average ‘Yes’ vote of 82% in Victoria was low com-
pared to the average 92–96% endorsements in the Lowan, Normanby,
and Portland electorates, and equally high votes in the urban centres of
Hamilton, Penshurst, Mortlake, and Warrnambool.
Towards the end of the century, railway easements also dissected the
landscape. Knife-like incisions were carved through carefully devised geo-
metric surveyed patchworks, rectilinear forested enclavés, and a sem-
blance of landscape equilibrium. These incisions cast havoc upon
‘established’ landscape divisions and pastoral activities undertaken by
graziers and selectors. Land excisions and exchanges, demolition of fenc-
ing and walling that forced the erection of new barriers, disruption of
wool carting ‘traditions’, new gates, and ignitions of grass verges by rail-
road engines, all prompted a flurry of paperwork to an unsympathetic
urban bureaucracy.
* * *
Security of tenure and cost efficiencies permitted, and encouraged, the

erection of land delimitation devices. Dry stone walls and wire fencing
were innovations, although post and rail fences persisted throughout the
time period. Barbed wire became more effective with its introduction in
the 1880s. By 1900, a seemingly endless landscape characterised by
fenced networks of paddocks and road reserves had been achieved.
In stony rise landscapes, dry stone walling proved a cheap and effective
means to aid the clearing and enclosure of paddocks and served as a rab-
bit control mechanism. Walling was a craft. ‘Cowans’ would lay two rows
of stone about 0.9 m apart, filling or ‘plugging’ the centre with smaller
stones and rubble. Successive courses were added tapering inwards until
overhanging top stones (often about 5.4 kg) were laid flat ‘capping’ or
‘coping’ the structure. Internal keystones or ‘binders’ bound the two
sides, projecting stone steps substituted for stiles, and foundations were
excavated to a clay plug base (often 0.9 m deep) laid with netting to aid
rabbit-proofing. Stones were collected from the paddocks, levered out of
the ground, and chipped as necessary to create the exposed sides; smaller
stones were used as ‘plugging’ or ‘pinning’ to create a smooth finish and
to prevent rabbit entry.
Dry stone walling was carried out in and near to stony rises. Walls were
erected extensively on ‘Purrumbete’ from 1856 and were maintained
especially to minimise rabbit intrusion from the Stony Rises, although
the railway line pierced this defence. Walls were also built on ‘Mount
Fyans’, on ‘Glenormiston’, and on ‘Larra’, and around Kolora and
Derrinallum in the 1860s. A beautiful 1.8 m high ‘bride price’ was erected
at Kolora, and in 1880, on ‘Mount Noorat’, ‘I pulled down old fences
that harboured Rabbits and built Rabbit proof stone walls with founda-
tions sunk’ 38.1 cm underground. ‘Jancourt’ was ‘entirely surrounded
[by 1885] with a rabbit-proof slab-fence’ to deter these terrors. An
8.85 km long dry stone wall was erected as part of the ‘Mount Hesse’-
’Barunah Plains’ boundary in 1862, and walling continued on ‘Mount
Hesse’ until the 1880s. Dry stone walling was also used at ‘Berry Bank’
between 1863 and 1866 to completely encircle the station.
Imported wire fencing rapidly subsumed the landscape, becoming
more prevalent as it became cheaper from local manufacture. Wire was
experimented with on ‘Golf Hill’ and ‘Terrinallum’, and advocated for by
squatters on ‘Glenormiston’, ‘Wando Vale’, and ‘Ercildoune’ in the early
1850s. On ‘Langi Willi’, in 1858, 5.6 km of ungalvanised, low tensile
wire was erected, and nearly 13 km of two rails and two wires were erected
between ‘Barunah Plains’ and ‘Mount Hesse’ in 1862. A 1.02 tonne ‘of
No. 5 fencing (‘Bull’) wire’ was used on ‘Purrumbete’ as part of extensive
fencing works. This activity continued past 1883 with the use of heavy
gauge ‘bull’ wire. Some 21.4 tonnes of ‘bull’ wire was also ordered for
‘Wiridgil’ in 1878. One can imagine the fencer, struggling with double-
cranked braces km after km, week after week, only to have ‘to do a big
round of repairs to wire fences’, such as on ‘Wooriwyrite’, year after year.
Wire had been used extensively on ‘Langford’ by the late 1870s and was
the predominant fencing mode on later selector subdivisions.
By the 1880s, barbed wire substituted the use of heavy gauge wire.
Timber post and rail fencing was however still used on several stations. In
1878, River Red Gum fencing of some 11,000 posts was ordered for
‘Purrumbete’ ‘as we all know the Red gum will soon be all gone’. In the
284 D. S. Jones
following year, 12,000 1.8 m high pickets were ordered for more fencing.
Timber fencing, 2.1–2.7 m high, 1.6 km long, was erected on ‘Goodwood’
in late 1865 as part of a kangaroo and stockyard complex, and paddocks
around Framlingham in 1885 were still divided ‘by a rough log-fence’.
On ‘Mount Noorat’, ‘posts and Railes’ were extensively used in confor-
mity with contractual conditions that required the splitter
to split and cart 100 Posts 6 feet 9 in long 5 × 7½ [2.1 m × 12.7 × 19.05 cm]
to be split from the back to be butted off three feet [0.9 m] from the base
and to be well charred the same distance also 1000 Rails 9 ft. long 7 × 2½
[2.7 m × 17.78 × 6.35 cm] to be split off the Quarter. The whole to be split
of good sound straight timber.
Another permeable boundary was the regular, but silent, marching of

River Red Gum telegraph poles across the landscape. A repetitious char-
acter feature, it grew from 1854 into an extensive network by the 1880s.
* * *
While fragments of scientific nomenclature were used in the previous

time period, they were isolated instances compared to their greater diffu-
sion in this time period. Knowledge of Humboldtian and Linnaean prin-
ciples were available only to educated travellers, but scientific names as
they were heard were readily adopted by squatters, overlanders, and
bureaucrats to aid their descriptions of flora, fauna, and geology.
The beginnings of this diffusion were mixed. Scientific inquiry was
overwhelmed by the popular adoption of scientific taxonomies, and yet
there was a lack of scientific curiosity in the landscape.
In subsequent time periods, travellers and residents used a mixture of
scientific or descriptive terms. Designations such as ‘honeysuckle’, ‘light-
wood’, ‘she oak’, ‘blackwood’, ‘white gum-trees’, ‘epacris’, ‘cherry tree’,
and ‘oak’, mixed with scientific terms of ‘anthistiria’, ‘banksia’, ‘eucalyp-
tus’, ‘exocarpus’, ‘casuarinæ’, and ‘mimosæ’ appear in letters, diaries, jour-
nals, reports, and novels. These terms provided descriptive symbols of the
particular species, with variable taxonomic accuracy in their
terminology.
This time period witnessed a cavalcade of scientific expeditions across

the greater colonial landscape to document and resumé its botanical, fau-
nal, and geological resources. The District was often, however, passed
over, given its established sheep walks and lack of picturesque or sublime
scenery, in favour of pockets of terra incognita. Those elements of scien-
tific value were perceived as being already ‘discovered’, accessible and
exploitable to the squatter and grazier.
Accordingly, the botanical lexicon developed outside this landscape was
imposed de facto without detailed scientific examinations that were only
amateur or random. The specimens collected during the travels of von
Mueller (1853, 1874, 1875) and Whilhelmi (1857) were minimal com-
pared to the amateur botanical collections of Curdie at ‘Tandarook’, Allitt
around Portland and Darlot’s Creek, Whan around Skipton, Wilson’s lichen
collections across the colony, or Rupp’s plant listings for the Beeac locality.
Identification and nomenclature taxonomy was also in its infancy.
Latin appellations attached a new standardised, but specialised, vocabu-
lary upon the landscape’s floristic inhabitants.
The faunal inhabitants fared worst in this diffusion. Their browsing
pastures and nesting hollows were quickly disrupted by colonials, sheep
and cattle flocks and herds, and colonial anti-vegetation policies, result-
ing in their rapid demise. Many vernacular appellations, however, bor-
rowed from the Dharuk language (around Port Jackson) and few of the
scientific names were incorporated as common terms.
Again, the lexicon was devised outside the landscape and imposed de
facto. Vernacular terms however predominated. Mitchell, unfamiliar
with this scientific realm, constantly referred to ‘kangaroos’, ‘emus’,
‘bronze-winged pigeons’, or the ‘rabbit rat’ rather than using scientific
nomenclature. As a consequence, and due to the lack of substantive field
surveys, sub-fossil remains provide the only historical profile of mammals
before colonial occupation.
A similar pattern occurred in the survey of the geological resources of
the District. By 1910, ‘No comprehensive geological description … [had]
yet been given of any particular area in the Western District, nor … [had]
any detailed map been published’. Similar detailed descriptions were pro-
vided by other second time period travellers and were also captured in the
scientific documentary canvases by von Guérard. But little geological
work was undertaken during this time period.
286 D. S. Jones
Of these three sciences, the botanical lexicon infused quickly into the
vernacular language in the landscape in contrast to the other two. By
1900, a mixture of both common and scientific botanical names were
used in both literature and conversation in the District.
* * *
Changes in place names were minimal in this time period although a
fascination with Aboriginal-derived etymology appears to have been
heightened. One traveller wrote:
The most striking new feature of this journey seemed to me the picturesque and
beautiful River Hopkins—beautiful in all but its name! Why give such starched,
hard, dot-and-go-one names, when there are Eumeralla, Wannon, Doutagalla,
Modewarra, Yarra Yarra, and countless other such natural and genial modula-
tions to had of the natives for the asking?
echoing similar sentiments written about the appellations of Taylor’s River

[Mt Emu Creek], and the Hopkins River, in the previous time period. The
petitioners of Tooli-o-rook [Derrinallum] expressed this fascination in their
request to the Colonial Secretary in 1872 to alter their town name to one
of three suggested (only) Aboriginal-derived appellations.
Both examples raise the possibility that Aboriginal place identification
beheld appellations of greater historic role and meaning than the new
‘starched’ names that dotted surveyors’ maps. The names belied past pos-
session and the presence of hidden meanings and stories in the landscape.
* * *
6.2 ‘Where the Earth Met the Sky’

The country between Ararat and Hamilton must have been first settled by
Scotchmen, for it suggests everywhere that you may be meeting young ‘Norval‘
whose father is looking after the sheep on yonder hills.
Henry Cornish, Under the Southern Cross, 1880
* * *
In 1875, author and critic Marcus Clarke constructed some passages of

landscape criticism to accompany the Photographs of the Pictures in the
National Gallery, Melbourne (1875), commenting upon Waterpool near
Coleraine (Sunset) (1869) by Louis Buvelôt and The Buffalo Ranges (1864)
by Nicholas Chevalier. It was a literary view that reaffirmed the primeval
desolation of the landscape, but added a new epithet by drawing out both
the conflict and romanticism of ‘weird melancholy’. An intuitive literary
response, it recalled his jackerooing days at ‘Swinton’ on ‘Ledcourt’ near
Glenorchy, in the shadows of Gariwerd [The Grampians], with a brightly
sanguine view of the future:
Australia has rightly been named the Land of the Dawning. Wrapped in the
mists of early morning, her history looms vast and gigantic.
Figures 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6 depict the places, railway line routes, and
routes of travellers mentioned in this section.
The lines foreshadowed an awakening to the ‘local sense of local beauty’
brought by literary travellers and artists who journeyed and explored the
landscape. This time period was marked by a technological innovation in
movement—the train—that alleviated the sense of monotonous distance
and brought accessibility to the landscape. Secondly, a maturing of cul-
tural attitudes heightened a change in perceptions away from European
differentiation and longingness. This section surveys the changes in the
time period through the oils and inks of a number of influential
personalities.
* * *
Travel was a sense of personal exploration of landscape that was quickly

vanishing from the adventurous to the common man. The arm-chair
traveller could enter into scenes previously sketched by newspapers and
journals, lithographs, and paintings; feel in awe and majesty; and ponder
the power and breadth of what was conveyed. Distance was shortened
and sweetened and became almost invisible; literary and pictorial images
288
D. S. Jones
Fig. 6.4 Railway lines 1900

Fig. 6.5 Routes of travellers. Source: H. Cornish, Under the Southern Cross, 1975; M. Kiddle, Men of Yesterday, 1961;
289
‘M. Twain’, Mark Twain, 1973; ‘The Vagabond’, Vagabond Country, 1981; Jim H. Willis, “Baron von Mueller’s
Involvement,” 1988
290
D. S. Jones

communicated the unknowns of the Australian continent to the overseas

or urban residents. The train symbolised progress, but numerous travel-
lers still enjoyed the ‘beastly domination of filth and mud’ on the District’s
main ‘roads’. It made the sense of travel tangible in contrast to the surreal
passage of place engendered in those handsomely padded leather seats,
with their foot warmers and lulling vibrations or ‘staccato’ notes.
* * *
Iron roads entered the District from Ararat in 1877, skirting the ‘flowery
plains’ below Gariwerd’s escarpment, and meeting at Hamilton in the
same year that rails were brought up from Portland. The captivating nov-
elty of the iron monster provoked clichés of ‘advancement’, ‘technology’,
and ‘progress’, arousing riotous political debates to ensure rail connec-
tions to townships and patrimonial estates in the District. Casterton and
Coleraine were connected in 1884 and 1898 by branch lines. A major
line came up from Warrnambool, by way of Koroit and Penshurst, to
Hamilton in 1890, joining with the recently opened Terang to Port Fairy
line. A branch line connected Penshurst to Dunkeld in August 1890 but
was closed in March 1891 and dismantled in February 1898.
Iron roads were a symbolic representation of ‘progress’. They opened
up the landscape to the traveller and provided an avenue for trade. Behind
this façade was also a technological imposition upon the landscape. Rails
required linear enclosures that contradicted original land settlement pat-
terns. Paddocks, allotments, stream edges, plantation strips, and forests
were all dissected by linear embankments of bluestone ballast, crowned
with interred lengths of River Red Gum, and two lines of iron. The land-
scape was redrawn, cut, filled, dissected, raised, channelled, tunnelled,
bricked, streams relocated or bridged, trees cut and removed, and the
lines mocked by ‘spartan architecture’ that honoured rituals of au revoir
and welcome. The latter provided symbolic stopping points in a mecha-
nised ‘walkabout’ on landscape.
River Red Gum sleepers and bridge piers came from Echuca, or were
cut from the Mt Cole and Otway forests, and the Victoria Valley forests.
Ballast quarries cut bluestone rubble from numerous hills and escarps;
quarries on the Hopkins and at Mt Stavely served the Ararat-Hamilton
292 D. S. Jones
line, and Mt Rouse served the Penshurst vicinity. Bricks were formed
from local clays to line culverts and colour the ‘spartan architecture’ of
stations ‘of brick construction with slate roofs’.
Railway construction also caused disruption and heartache for gra-
ziers. Colonials at ‘Purrumbete’ were frustrated with the alignment, con-
struction, and progress of the line through their holdings. Standard
fencing along the line was not sheep-proof, engines set fire to grasses, the
alignment cut through stone rabbit-proof walls, ballast quarries were left
forlorn, platforms or sidings were never convenient, and there was the
sheer frustration of dealing with bureaucracies. Notwithstanding all these
difficulties, the steam vehicle of ‘progress’ did not acquire a place in paint-
ings as it did in North American frontier images.
* * *
As journey became important, the focus of societal improvements was

redirected to assist this process. The status of steam highlighted the iron
rails, but it was the tracks and roads that were still the mundane attention
of local communities. With floods, ‘fences and (sheep) bridges were car-
ried away’, bullock teams drowned and up-turned their loads, and the
mail was lost. Roads full of ‘waggons and drays carting potatoes and other
farm produce’, deeply rutted or ‘liquid mud’ tracks in the paths of team-
ster’s and bullocky’s, and flooded gullys, all suffered from increased use
and the need to improve movement of goods, bales of wool, produce, and
the mail. The volume of movements prompted road construction, surfac-
ing, ‘metal pitching’, culvert, bridge, and drain construction and marking.
Road construction became an immediate need. Mile stones were laid
along many paths, bluestone culverts were constructed, and blue metal
‘pitched’ near ‘Langi Willi’ and on numerous Skipton area roads.
Permanent bluestone bridges were constructed at fords and across Brown’s
Waterholes, Mundy’s Gully, Fiery, Salt, Mt Emu, and Muston’s Creeks,
and over the Woady Yalloak and Hopkins at Cressy, Hexham, and
Wickliffe. Major roads to Ballarat, Hamilton, and Warrnambool were
‘pitched’. Where roads passed swamps, they were drained and channelled,
and water dams were added to the road reserves for drainage and stock
movements. In the Woolsthorpe, Lismore, and Skipton areas, numerous
Blue and Sugar Gums, ‘Kangaroo Acacia’, ‘sheoaks’, and ‘honeysuckles’

lining roadscapes were planted to provide stock shelter. ‘Stone-crushing
machines, with locomotive engines‘, road rollers, dray carts loaded with
the distinctive basalt, gangs of men, and spray mists of brown and clayey
soils identified points of activity, and the collective pride of road boards.
Notwithstanding all these ‘improvements’,
roads led out straight in several directions, all at right angles with one
another, … they were still long straight, road[s]: You could [still] see for miles
on every side, to where the earth met the sky.
* * *
In 1867, Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, travelled through the

District on a tour fit for an aristocrat. He was fêted in Melbourne and
Geelong, treated to rabbit and kangaroo shoots at ‘Barwon Park’ and
‘Chatsworth’, nostalgically soothed by a highland fling at ‘Glenormiston’
where the ‘verandah [had been] covered in … which makes the place
complete for a large corrobery’, and conveyed throughout by coach.
Bonfires raged on the hills of Noorat, Timboon, Koang, Meningoort,
and Kayang to celebrate his procession, but for all the pageantry, the
Duke disappointed his commoners and pursued his native Highland sports.
A Royal messenger he came

Though most unworthy of the name.
Anthony Trollope, when travelling through the District, appears to

have constructed an image of squattocracy in the clubs of Melbourne by
‘imagine[ing] that the life of the Victorian landowner is very much as was
that of the English country gentlemen a century or a century and a half
ago’. To J.A. Froude, ‘Mark Twain’, and Henry Cornish, there was more
to be gained by venturing into the landscape and travelling its dusty or
iron roads. Froude disembarked at the ‘solitary halting-place’ of
‘Ercildoune’, and was driven by dray into the ‘illusion’ of an ‘English
aristocrat’s country house reproduced in another hemisphere’. To him,
294 D. S. Jones
the ‘halting-place’ was a scene of dusty straight roads, desolate expanses

and dreariness; the homestead was a refuge —a contradiction. ‘Mark
Twain’, in Following the Equator (1897), observed from the Melbourne-
Adelaide train window:
The scrub stretches miles and miles in all directions, and looks like a level roof
of bush-tops without a break or a crack in it—as seamless as a blanket, to all
appearance. One might as well walk under water and hope to guess out a route
and stick to it, I should think.
If there was monotony in such a window frame, the scene was different
on his return from Adelaide, in short dray rides. ‘The time, noonday; no
wind; the sky without a cloud, the sunshine brilliant—and the mercury
at 92° in the shade’. The air was ‘fine and pure and exhilarating [sic] …
great melancholy gum trees’ edged roads through an expanse of ‘empty
space’ comprising ‘an inspiring cloud of sumptuous yellow bloom’ caught
his eye as well as native birds, and ‘the majestic march of a flowing sea’ in
the clouds above. His ‘cream-white’ clayey road ‘led through a forest of
great gum-trees, lean and scraggy and sorrowful’ to that same ‘halting-
place’. Contradicting Froude, ‘Twain’ found
great green expanses of rolling pasture-land, bisected by eye-contenting hedges of

commingled new-gold and old-gold gorse—and a lovely lake … balmy and
comfortable, fresh and bracing. A perfect climate.
Cornish, holidaying Under the Southern Cross (1880) in the late 1870s,
was ‘determined … to go to Hamilton partly to see what the country was
like’. From the train window at that ‘halting-place’, ‘the land was every-
where neatly fenced and trenched … The country is everywhere so desti-
tute of rivers that artificial drainage is necessary’. Passing near Mt Stavely:
The flocks about here seem interminable, and as our train whisked through the
fields, thousands of startled lambs scampered away to their mothers with terri-
fied cries of ‘m-ma’.
This ‘novel scenery’ was a magical canvas to Abram-Louis Buvelôt, but

an austere botanical palette to Ferdinand von Mueller. As early as
November 1853 von Mueller traversed the plains quickly, passing Lake
Colac and Mt Noorat before following the Hopkins River to climb Mt
William, and enter the Wimmera and Mallee. In the mid-1870s, he
returned again, briefly, to the District. His quaint, mythical, lone person-
age, on a white steed, with knowledgeable breadth, is woven into the
landscape and the plot of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) as Dr Mulhaus. Buvelôt
made an extensive sketching trip across the plains, reaching Coleraine at
the invitation of, and in search of commissions from, pastoralists.
Favourite scenes at ‘Mount Fyans’, ‘Terrinallum’, Coleraine, and Wannon
Falls, were recaptured in his paintings. The most detailed account of a
journey through this landscape are articles written by ‘The Vagabond’
and published in The Argus. He records the sui generis railway fare, the
primitive fastening of passengers into carriages, the delightful views from
windows as well as his travels by horse, dray, and coach throughout the
plains. ‘Tower-hill Lake and the islands therein are picturesque, curious,
and attractive alike to the tourist and the scientist’—a ‘sacred’ place. In
Woodford, ‘the buildings [were] irregularly built and situated, none of
that cardboard regularity visible in the road and houses which Australia
has borrowed from America’, and then there was the cleanliness and sweet
smells of dairy farms:
On past fields divided by hawthorn hedges, the sweet perfume of whose flowers
fills the air; on past many a fertile potato patch, and many a paddock where the
milch cow and the pig peacefully fatten … Soon we come to the … primal bush.
Passing through the Stony Rises, he again entered a ‘pastoral Eden’.

Grand, rich paddocks are viewed, roadside advertising ‘mars’ the plea-
sure, there are creeks to ford carefully, numerous pleasure spots to visit,
rabbit and kangaroo shoots to partake, empty pig-carts to pass, and wind-
ing tracks. No notion of wilderness is present; all is familiar. ‘Weird mel-
ancholy’ is not discussed, though it is implicit in the stories told. A sense
of discovery continues the momentum in the articles.
* * *
296 D. S. Jones
To these travellers, the path had moved from a trackless ‘wilderness’ of

boggy, dusty, and rut-filled routes across monotonous plains, guided only
by those peculiar hills, into spaces of community ritual, meeting, or
crossing, that were familiar, defined, and secure. Landscape was mapped
and marked by named objects, features, and shimmering lakes; gone was
the landscape of the imagination so enlivened by ‘Boldrewood’ or
Kingsley. Gone, especially, were the untraceable vestiges of footsteps and
lines held only in the minds and songs of Aboriginal culture: a mystical,
musical landscape of song maps contained in oral literatures that did not
require the tangible fenestration so necessary for colonial travellers.
* * *
6.3 Markers on the Plains

The River Glenelg, which flows at our feet, was the raison d’être of Casterton,
as of so many Australian towns … at first situated on a tongue of land between
the main river and an anabranch, now extends straight up the opposite hillside,
the high street very much resembling in position the Rue d’Alma in Noumea. A
fine, broad main thoroughfare this at Casterton, well metalled, drained, and
with good sidewalks, planted with trees.
‘The Vagabond’, The Argus, May 2, 1885
* * *
Townships directed community activities in this time period. Community

focal points shifted from homestead villages to maturing townships of
deity and culture, aided by a communication revolution. These new cen-
tres were denoted by crowns of chimneys, spires, and corrugated iron in
straggly islands of greenery.
Associated with townships were constellations of resort spaces, trans-
portation nodes, and revered places. The latter, often churches and cem-
eteries, laid the foundation stones for a set of European histories about
this landscape. By the turn of the century, familiar colours, smells, and
cultural structures had taken hold in the landscape, analogous to other
English and Scottish influenced cultural landscapes.
This section explores these centres of cultural maturation and provides
a summary of their roles in the landscape. Townships, centres of public
resort, and places of reverence matured into prominent meeting points to
exchange artefacts and information, to celebrate religion and history, and
to recreate.
* * *
Townships acquired identities through the collections of structures and

functions they possessed. Each was unified by their common destiny to
serve the plains landscape. In each, church spires reached upwards, raw
bluestone or white painted timber façades, islands of new trees and the
glitter of corrugated iron roofing identified their locations in the
landscape.
A visitor to Camperdown in the 1880s found ‘no pretentious public
buildings’, only ‘one broad main road, a cross street, a magnificent ave-
nue of elms, and Mount Leura’. Around these clustered the hotels, banks,
schools, six churches, stores, the railway station, and picket fence enclosed
residences. To the west, the little village of Noorat clutched at its cross-
roads, and an exquisite bluestone Presbyterian Church on one corner
signified its roots. In the fields beyond, only a bluestone doorstep denoted
its namesake manse, destroyed by bushfires in 1880. Further west, below
Mt Shadwell, Mortlake continued to prosper around a wide main street
bounded by shops, hotels, banks, shire office, court house, post and tele-
graph office, and a scatter of picket-fenced weatherboard cottages lining
the roads that led out into the landscape. From church spires, and the old
bluestone chimney of the flour mill, one could look down upon kerosene
lit lanterns and smokey wisps from home stoves and fires.
On the road to Hamilton, the villages of Hexham and Caramut con-
tinued to congregate around their main streets and birth-right roadside
inns. To these communities, along barren streetscapes, were added a series
of churches, new stores, post and telegraph offices, halls, schools, and
numerous weatherboard cottages. Dreams of importance had been lost to
298 D. S. Jones
Mortlake and Penshurst. The latter was ‘quite a place’ with its gridded
townscape, three churches, banks, hotels, school, railway station, steam-
driven flour mill, tanneries, and numerous substantial stone-built and
weatherboard cottages, with a dusty thunder echoing from the scoria and
stone quarries on an escarp of the treeless Mt Rouse.
A visitor to the ‘straggling township [of Hamilton in 1885 met] with
many new houses, and a good deal of corrugated iron’. Here was ‘a beau-
tiful town’ with a prosperous community of 3300 citizens, with houses,
government offices, banks, churches, flour-mills, carriage and coach fac-
tories, botanic gardens, schools, and ‘stores and shops, everything required
for necessity, comfort, fashion, and luxury’ could be procured.
To the west, a traveller entered the vales of the Wannon: ‘rolling, open
downs, thickly grassed, soil evidently of the very best quality’ that were
depicted in the Rococco pastoral scene of Bush Creek, Coleraine (1874).
Coleraine, with a population of about 700, nestled in a hollow ‘in the
midst of trees and cultivated paddocks’, with a long broad street sur-
rounded by white-painted weatherboard houses, brick façades of banks,
stores, council chambers, railway station, post and telegraph office, inns,
school, mechanics’ institute, and flour mill, with River Red Gum saw
mills in the distant vales. Downstream, the townscape of Casterton ‘seems
clean, and neat, and prosperous’ with ‘hills all around dotted with pleas-
ant residences’ of about 850 residents. An ‘entrepôt for the produce of the
border’ due to its rail terminus and river crossing, the town also hosted a
post and telegraph office, inns, school, mechanics’ institute, brick council
chamber, stores and hotels, steam flour mill, foundry, tannery, and nearby,
granite quarries and River Red Gum saw pits.
South of Mt Napier, the townships of Macarthur, Hawkesdale and
Woolsthorpe were quiet, ‘orderly and moral place[s]’ of some 150–300
residents each. Composed of churches, banks, mechanics’ institutes, post
and telegraph offices, hotels, ‘good stores, blacksmiths’, and wheelwrights’
shops’, they were quite pleasant communities serving surrounding sta-
tions and selections.
On the plains, the little wayside inn crossings were growing into small
towns united in their wide main streets and typified by the ‘weatherboard
cottage with glass windows and neatness of paint, then the picket fence
in shining white surrounded by tasteful gardens’.
The towns of Dunkeld, Derrinallum, Skipton, Wickliffe, Lake Bolac,

Lismore, Streatham, Darlington, and Cressy, all carried the signs of the
harsh environment. Yet they bore common parallels in church spires,
rickety wooden school buildings, bluestone bridges, bluestone hotels,
banks, stores, mechanics’ institutes, wide main streets laced with Blue
Gums and Monterey Pines, dust and drab coloured textures, and small
weatherboard or bluestone cottages with verandahs and kennedia sprawl-
ing in the gardens amidst lemon and apple trees and clothes lines.
* * *
In an open field south of ‘Larra’ homestead is a bluestone cairn, con-

structed from stones used in the first ‘Larra’ hut that bears two plaques.
Erected in 1883, the first plaque reads: ‘1883, JLC & TA, SITE OF
FIRST HUT, AP 24 1844’.
The cairn recalls a point in the story of the landscape. It is but one of
numerous stones bearing inscriptions commemorating visits or events,
that lie in cemeteries, gardens, structure foundations, or open paddocks
across the District. They are sacred epitaphs of ancestors and their
campsites.
Private cemeteries, as more memories were interred, became revered
sites. Dark cypress trees now shadowed several graves in the West Cloven
Hills private cemetery. New gravestones sprouted in the ‘Eeyeuk’,
‘Merrang’, ‘Carranballac’, and ‘Naringal’ private cemeteries amidst sol-
emn cypress and pine sentinels. New private cemeteries had been estab-
lished on ‘Murndal’, ‘Eurambeen’, and ‘Nareeb-nareeb’. An unusual
headstone, inscribed ‘Barrinbittarney/1878’, was placed in the ‘Nareeb-
nareeb’ graveyard recalling an Aboriginal friend.
Community cemeteries, however, gained a stronger symbolic prole in
the landscape as their occupants, headstones, and funereal trees increased
as time progressed. In the picturesque Camperdown cemetery, erected in
1885, an imposing 7.6 m monument of grey granite engraved with a
boomerang, a leeowil or fighting club, a throwing stick, the dates ‘1840’
and ‘1883’ and an inscription recalling Wombeetch Puyuun (or
‘Camperdown George’), and the passing of local Aboriginals, still watches
over the plains of his ancestors. The cemetery also contained many
300 D. S. Jones
headstones of squatters, as did the cemeteries of Balmoral, Penshurst, and

Dunkeld. They often comprised ‘little fenced-in … [squares with a]
sprinkling of white headstones forming a landmark in the bare, undulat-
ing country’, such as at Tower Hill. Terang Cemetery, reserved in 1887,
however, occupied 4 ha dissected in a rectangular plan with a central
diamond-shaped lawn. Irish Yew and Italian Cypress served as predomi-
nant symbolic plantings, surrounded by hawthorn hedges. By 1890,
there were 385 internments in this enclosure with many elaborate monu-
ments to past colonials. Most striking were the Pimlett memorial pillar
crowned by an angel, and the Black memorial that had bluestone foot-
ings, polished pink granite and iron railings, and seven crypts made of
pink granite with lead engraved lettering dating from 1880.
Other markers were positioned to recall past ancestors. One could still
touch the corral, erected in 1836 to stable horses that symbolically linked
the site to the ‘discovery’ of this landscape. A foundation stone was laid
in 1868 at the ‘Kolor’ homestead recalling the family that created the
edifice, and on the cairn at ‘Larra’, in 1894, a second plaque was added to
celebrate the jubilee of the erection of the first homestead. Another cairn
was positioned on a grassy shoulder overlooking Henty Creek and the
Wannon flood plains to celebrate the first homestead of ‘Merino Downs’.
Foundation stones were laid in 1869 for the bluestone Letts Ford bridge
over the Hopkins at Ellerslie, and on the bluestone Barwon Bridge at
Winchelsea in 1867. The latter was laid by Prince Alfred, undated because
of the rush in completing the project. Foundation stones were also laid in
1876 for the new imposing two-storey ‘Golf Hill’ homestead, and for the
new two-storey sandstone ‘Gringegalgona’ homestead in 1873. In the
waving grasses near ‘Wooriwyrite’, a lonely bluestone doorstep recalled
the Kilnoorat Church manse, destroyed by bushfires in 1880.
* * *
In the late 1860s, Buvelôt spent several weeks sketching in the valleys of
the Wannon, including sites at the Upper and Lower Wannon Falls. The
Upper Falls of the Wannon (1874) captured a magical scene of public
resort in the landscape:
The music of waters in the midst of the profound solitude of an Australian wild
can easily be imagined from the picture.
The Falls provided inspiration for numerous artists in this time period,
as did a number of other natural features that became points of public
resort. The Wannon Falls (c.1860) was ‘very much admired’ in its represen-
tation of scenery. At ‘any season this … [was] a most picturesque and weird
place’ that captivated the visitor and provided sites for many ‘chicken-pie
and champagne’ picnics. A similar inspiration and picnic spot was located
below the Hopkins Falls, but it never attracted the artists’ attention.
The 121.4 ha Basin Banks reserve, a natural focal point near
Camperdown, hosted many picnics and sailing adventures on the lakes.
Adjacent to 1.2 ha Botanic Gardens were ‘smooth walks, soft springy
lawns, beds of flowers, and a miniature grove of pines’. But, ‘unfortu-
nately for the public, Mount Leura … [nearby, was] not a public reserve’.
Here was an eminence that enticed the tourist into being a trespasser to
gain a panorama that was otherwise freely accessible to a visitor to the Mt
Rouse public reserve.
At Koroit, Tower Hill was ‘picturesque, curious, and attractive alike to
the tourist and the scientist’. Notwithstanding this praise, in the 1880s,
the Reserve had become very different from the sublime image in Tower
Hill (1855):
The fine trees on the cones and the craters on the island, all gone excepting a half
dozen or so and the banks turned into a cabbage garden. But what was a thou-
sand times worse than this ruthless destruction of ornamental timber, the lower
portion of the lake is turned into a stinking mud pool.
These were ‘sacred places for a great people’s pleasure’ and they became
major gathering points of public resort in the District during this
time period.
* * *
302 D. S. Jones
6.4 Crowning Follies

A moment more, and we were at the door of what might have been an ancient
Scotch manor house, solidly built of rough-hewn granite, the walls overrun
with ivy, climbing roses, and other multitudinous creepers, which formed a
border to the diamond-paned, old-fashioned windows.
J.A. Froude, Oceana, Or England and her Colonies, 1880
* * *
Time and cultivation brought prosperity and familiarity. The mid-1860s

and 1870s experienced peaks in fleece prices and the returns were invested
back into structures and infrastructure necessary to improve and nurture
flocks. The ubiquitous bluestone provided the signature material for these
pastoral structures. Its use, however, came to the fore in the mid-1870s
when traditional restraint on the homestead structure was thrown out the
lancet window and a building madness possessed the landscape. Even the
dour sober and thrifty owner of ‘Mount Noorat’ remarked:
I even dread that the prevailing mania may infect myself and induce me to
erect a more expensive building that will be suitable for the estate under
more adverse circumstances which I fancy I can see looming in the distance.
The mania eventually consumed him and a two-storey masonry

Italianate mansion, with Gothic lodge, ha-ha walls, and extensive gardens
arose in 1877 below Mt Noorat. The madness ensnared most occupants
of the landscape and the echoes of quarries, bluestone masons, bullocks
full of building materials, and sawing registered the prolific erection of
mansions, lavish woolsheds, churches, bridges, and the laying out of
expansive gardens. Bluestone formed the unifying texture, Gothicism the
stylistic language, and sheep became the mythical symbol immortalised
in the substance of the edifices.
These structures were the emblematic representations of this new
regime. Persistence was rewarded by prosperity, primitive shelters gave
way to manors, ‘parkes’ and follies, and the landscape became enriched
and entranced in the sheep. This section examines the products of this
mania. Monuments that reinforced a set of stories and myths, unique to
the District, based around the landscape spirit and the sheep.
* * *
High prices for washed and quality fleece on the London markets in the
1860s and mid-1870s were catalyses for building booms over the same
years. The post-1870s homesteads arose from an era that witnessed
increased pastoral technology in woolshed design, shearing techniques,
sheep washing and breeding methods, resulting in improved fleece quality,
improved pastures, fencing forms, and complementary building forms.
Post-1870s constructions continued the use of bluestone, encircling
verandahs, and a flair for architectural design evinced in 1840s–1870s
homesteads. These traits were, however, expanded in a flourish by skilled
craftsmen, the imagination of architects, and fathomless bank balances.
Bluestone became a sculptural form yet maintained its uniting force in
the landscape. Gothic Revivalism and Classicism were adopted as domi-
nant stylistic languages creating a strong regional design insignia. And
verandahs became garnished in delicate cast iron lacework as these out-
door rooms were expanded in size and role. The single-storey Classical
Revival bluestone and slate tiled ‘Kolor’ (1868) with its asymmetrical
plan, dominant tower with bellcast roof, and circular pagoda-like veran-
dah, epitomised the high craftsmanship that could be obtained from the
stone. Its solid form, texture, and ready availability from the District’s
quarries enabled ‘very handsome’ mansions and churches to be erected.
Design styles, especially Gothic, brought forth distinctive individuality,
but the bluestone ensured unity in the mass of structures erected.
The stylistic language of Gothic Revivalism diffused from church struc-
tures across the landscape. With underpinnings in Presbyterianism, the
language first appeared in managers’ and workmen’s cottages before being
applied in mansion design from the mid-1860s until 1900. The language
drew inspiration from plates and philosophies in Dictionnaire Raisonnée de
L’Architecture Française (1854–1863) for direction, or from contemporary
traditions of the Renaissance in Classicism, resulting in structures such as
the unusual steep-roofed Gothic Turkish bath house (c.1866) on
304 D. S. Jones
‘Dunmore’ with its two-chamber square-coursed bluestone structure,

Gothic portal, and highlight windows, or the cement rendered bluestone
asymmetrical Classical ‘Mount Fyans’ homestead (1883) with its ornate
encircling cast iron verandah and impressive Corinthian portico.
Verandahs and porticos, often painted white, provided delicate orna-
ments to a homestead by lightening the general appearance of the sombre
bluestone mass. An encircling cast iron verandah with Doric portico
added to the original Classical Revival homestead of ‘Chatsworth House’
in the late 1860s, an elaborate cast iron verandah added to the slate tiled
single-storey basalt Classical ‘Titanga’ (1894), an unusual cast iron two-
storey verandah attached to one elevation of ‘Minjah’ homestead in 1870
were examples. When the utilitarian Romanesque two-storey bluestone
‘Barwon Park’ with its 42 rooms was constructed in 1869, a very distinc-
tive cast iron balcony verandah structure, with family crests and the
motto ‘Ne Quid Omnis Neo Timeo Si Erno’, was included deliberately
in the design.
The design at the entrance and balcony is made to harmonise with the features
of the verandah and has a fine bold effect, the principal opening being a wide
semi-circular arch, having on either side smaller arches so as to bring up the
required height gradually …
Simplicity and austerity marked homestead designs of the 1860s, with

a preference towards homestead additions than to complete new struc-
tures. The former included a substantial single-storey bluestone Classical
extension with Ionic portico to the small four-room stone cottage com-
prising ‘Merrang’ (1865), square-coursed basalt rear extension wings to
the unpretentious ‘Kuruc-a-ruc’ homestead (1866), four more rooms and
a tower in ‘Italian to be in keeping with’ the existing ‘Wurrook’ home-
stead (1867), and a two-room bluestone addition to ‘Yarima’ (1867).
New homesteads included the sombre single-storey bluestone ‘Barunah
Plains’ (1867) to replace the ‘poor wooden one‘, the single-storey blue-
stone Classical Revival ‘Kolor’ (1868) with its bellcast roof capped tower,
and the single-storey coursed granite ‘Clunies’ (c.1864) with northern
verandah shielding unusual valances and French windows. In 1866, an
attempt was made to replace the original slab double hipped roof cottage
of ‘Carr’s Plains’: ‘The [orange-red] bricks were duly made and stacked …
[by contractors, but] the stack was found to be hollow’, enabling only a
further hipped roof section to be added to the homestead.
Of these austere shelters, nothing could compare with the two-storey
42-room bluestone Romanesque ‘Barwon Park’, erected in 1869 during
the 1868–1871 recession. It set the precedent for third period homesteads
which would only be eclipsed by the two-storey 60-room Italian
Renaissance mansion with tower at ‘Werribee Park’ in 1876.
From the recession, a decade of massive homestead construction
ensued. In 1870, the third ‘Minjah’ homestead, a two-storey bluestone
stucco rendered Classical mansion, with unusual cast iron verandah and
pattern book motifs in the render was erected, and up the valley the
single-storey square basalt Classical homestead of ‘Wurroit’ with plain
timber double-columned verandah was also being erected. Nearby, the
bluestone ‘Injemira’ homestead on an escarp of the Merri was also under
construction. In 1871, ‘Ripple Vale’ and ‘Titanga’ were built. The former
involved a single-storey Victorian Italianate red brick homestead, with
French Romanesque details reflecting nineteenth-century pattern book
architecture, and the latter was a chaste single-storey bluestone Classical
homestead without the designed verandah.
In 1873, the boom was in full flow with ‘Narrapumelap’, ‘Coragulac
House’, ‘Glenisla’, ‘Gringegalgona’, ‘Eurack’, and ‘Mooramong’, under
construction and with additions at ‘Gala’, ‘Bleak House’, and ‘Mount
Hesse’ in progress.
The folly of ‘Narrapumelap’, an imposing asymmetrical single-storey
bluestone French Gothic Revival mansion with central projecting gabled
wing, ornamental Waurn Ponds limestone dressings, monogrammed stain
glass highlights and fanlights, cast rampant lions for the entry terrace,
18.2 m high French Gothic ‘look-out tower’, bow and bay windows, and
cast iron verandah, could only be summarised as ‘picturesque, characteris-
tic and complete’. Others were lesser castles: ‘Coragulac House’ comprised
a single-storey bluestone Victorian Classical homestead with two cone-
topped slate towers; ‘Glenisla’ comprised a single-storey Grampians sand-
stone Gothic homestead with encircling finely detailed Gothic timber
verandah and radiating service wings enclosing a flagged courtyard;
‘Gringegalgona’ was constructed of Dundas Range freestone and Coleraine
sandstone in a two-storey symmetrical Italianate design with returning
306 D. S. Jones
timber columned verandah; the picturesque Gothic single-storey ‘Eurack’

was erected in bluestone; and ‘Mooramong’ was constructed in timber
weatherboards to a Gothic design. Additions themselves were never plain
or small. To ‘Bleak House’, a modest stone house, was added significant
Gothic Revival extensions. Further north, the dour two-storey bluestone
rubble homestead of ‘Mount Hesse’ was radically transformed into a blue-
stone French Gothic manor with Waurn Ponds limestone dressings, in
contrast to austere additions to nearby ‘Berry Bank’ in the previous year
that conformed to the existing homestead design.
From 1874 to 1879, new homesteads at ‘Golf Hill’, ‘Eeyeuk’, ‘The
Gums’, ‘Stony Point’, ‘Glenfine’, ‘Larra’, ‘Monivae’, ‘Mount Noorat’,
‘Mountside’, and ‘Yeo’ were constructed, and significant additions were
completed at ‘Tarndwarncoort’ and ‘Murndal’, as a part of this building
mania. The simple Palladian brick villa of ‘Golf Hill’ was demolished in
favour of a two-storey 30-room bluestone Classical structure reminiscent
of a nineteenth-century French château, a two-storey half coursed blue-
stone homestead with verandah in Classical style was erected at ‘Eeyeuk’,
an imposing two-storey stucco-faced bluestone axially arranged Classical
homestead with portico and encircling cast iron verandah was erected at
‘The Gums’, and the original four-room stone ‘Stony Point’ homestead
was transformed into a Classical bluestone residence with unusual harled
façades, accentuated quoins, encircling verandah and prominent entry
portico. At ‘Glenfine’ an asymmetrical two-storey stuccoed bluestone
Gothic homestead with cast iron verandah was constructed. Whereas
‘Larra’ was erected as a more restrained single-storey bluestone Gothic
homestead with encircling cast iron verandah, but managed to include
crenellated battlements, twin bay windows, and narrow lancet ventila-
tors. A severe Classical two-storey bluestone mansion with an unusual
encircling filigree cast iron verandah-balcony with grouped columns was
erected at ‘Monivae’, and an ‘elegant’ two-storey stucco-covered blue-
stone Italianate mansion was erected at ‘Mount Noorat’ at a previously
determined and landscaped site. ‘Mountside’ and ‘Yeo’ also continued
the use of bluestone and a fascination with French Mediaeval design traits.
The boom slowed in the 1880s and 1890s, but the impressive home-
steads of ‘Poligolet’, ‘Mount Fyans’, ‘Meningoort’, ‘Wooriwyrite’,
‘Kongbool’, ‘Talindert’, ‘Wando Dale’, and ‘Gazette’ were constructed,
with ‘Murndal’, ‘Purrumbete’, and ‘Berry Bank’ again undertaking exten-

sive additions, and ‘Titanga’ finally adding its previously designed veran-
dah. These works continued the traditions of coursed bluestone, or the
more common brick stucco, encircling cast iron verandahs, slate roofs,
and Classical or Gothic design styles, although the later ‘Gazette’ was
stuccoed brick with a fusion of Italianate and early Edwardian styles.
Completely new third period homesteads also sought to exploit their
position in the landscape. ‘Barwon Park’ was located 0.8 km from the
1849 homestead site to a position ‘commanding an extensive view of the
surrounding country’. The new homestead of ‘Eeyeuk’, in 1875, was
erected at a site that enabled supervision of the paddocks and local stock
routes compared to the homestead’s original location which was more
sheltered from the microclimate and the public eye. ‘Mount Noorat’
replaced a small rubble stone house, but was located ‘at a great elevation‘
on a ridge of the eminence enabling sweeping views of the landscape.
Design styles continued, also, to draw inspiration from architectural
treatises and pattern book design manuals. The Dictionnaire Raisonnée de
L’Architecture Française (1854–1863), The Gentleman’s House (1865), and
Examples of Architectural Art in Italy and Spain (1850) guided many third
period designs, especially at ‘Barwon Park’, ‘Wooriwyrite’, ‘Narrapumelap’,
and ‘Wurrook’.
Portraiture also continued to celebrate the focal point homestead sur-
rounded by the woolshed and related structures on an island of greenery.
Images of Yalla-y-Poora Homestead (1864), Terrinallum Station (1869),
Mount Fyans Homestead (1869), and Wando Dale Homestead (1876) hon-
oured both these homesteads and the golden fleece. The celebration,
however, declined with the arrival of the plein air movement that sought
to portray domesticity of the landscape and life while capturing the
tonalities of light and shine.
* * *
Allied to the homestead were other pastoral structures, including the

woolshed, storage buildings, stables, sheepwashes, and a plethora of
buildings that constituted the homestead compound, or village. The unit
formed a surrogate township subservient to the homestead much like
308 D. S. Jones
manorial villages in Scotland and England. The village, in Scottish ver-

nacular style, of ‘Leslie Manor’, the scattered collection of structures set
in 5.6 ha of gardens at ‘Ercildoune’, or the English village-like forecourt
of ‘Murndal’ illustrates this development. Another integrated ‘village’ was
at ‘Warrock’ where storerooms, a grain house, dairy, bacon-curing house,
belfry, coach house, blacksmith’s shop, woolshed, station hands’ dining
room, kitchen, stables, workshop, cow bale, pig styles, bullock byre, dog
kennels, bathhouse, killing house, lavatories, old woolshed, 13 brick-
lined 6.7 m deep underground cisterns, old homestead, and new home-
stead, are all unified on 2.4 ha by their clustered atmosphere, pinkish
wooden or tawny brick colours, and mid-nineteenth-century pattern
book sources.
Woolsheds of the 1870s–1900 were more advanced in form, contin-
ued the use of bluestone, indulged in design details, but were now sec-
ondary to homestead construction. In 1872, an austere square coursed
bluestone woolshed with clerestory was erected on ‘Titanga’, on nearby
‘Terrinallum’ a rectangular square coursed bluestone woolshed with cen-
tral shearing board was also designed and constructed, and at
‘Narrapumelap’ a bluestone T-plan woolshed with 20 blade stands was
erected in 1873. These were rare and austere constructions compared to
the edifices erected at ‘Ingleby’ and ‘Mount Elephant’ in 1882 and 1887.
The former was an impressive utilitarian 24 blade stand T-plan bluestone
structure decorated in reduced classical pediments and urns, and the lat-
ter was also a T-shaped bluestone utilitarian structure but raised with a
ditch between the foundations to permit regular cleaning activities.
High fleece prices for cleansed wool encouraged the design of more
sophisticated and effective structures for hot water sheep washing. A gra-
zier or an architect had to spend much time ‘studying and inventing and
thoroughly understanding their construction’ to create successful designs.
Early designs, in the 1860s, were at ‘Berry Bank’, ‘Barunah Plains’, ‘Gala’,
on ‘Kuruc-a-ruc’ on Kuruc-a-ruc Creek, and on ‘The Meadows’. The new
sheepwash on ‘Berry Bank’, constructed in 1868, with its associated
buildings and boiler, replaced a more vernacular dyke placed across
Gnarkeet Chain of Ponds upstream from the homestead in 1863. A
sheepwash constructed at ‘Larra’ involved hydraulic engineering works to
gravity feed water from Lake Tooliorook and some springs, and on
‘Glenisla’ a brick-lined sheepwash with storage dam and boiler operated

in the 1870s. On other stations, a ‘small lake‘ or dam, near to the shear-
ing shed, was maintained as a substitute, like on ‘Langford’ or
‘Wooriwyrite’. Formed from drystone walls, these sheepwashes consisted
of a network of pre- and post-washing yards, races, washing areas, and
holding areas. By 1880, this practice, across the District, was abandoned
in favour of more industrialised wool cleaning processes, as premium
cleansed fleece prices declined.
In contrast to woolsheds and sheepwashes, homestead stables, man-
ager’s quarters, and gatehouses received considerable design attention.
They were often a third period homestead finishing touch of the 1870s,
although those built in the 1860s were given more design attention.
The single-storey gabled bluestone Manager’s Cottage (c.1866) on
‘Yalla-y-poora’, with verandah, slate roof and Gothic Revival timber
barge-boards and gable clock, epitomises the attention given to workers’
accommodation in the 1860s. Concern was given to their habitations to
ensure their long-term association with a station. A further illustration is
the 1868 two-room bluestone Overseer’s House at ‘Kuruc-a-ruc’ with its
picturesque Gothic pointed masonry arches, decorative slate roof ventila-
tors and buttressed chimney, in stark contrast to the austere bluestone
additions to ‘Kuruc-a-ruc’ homestead two years previously. Similar atten-
tion for Shearer’s Quarters and Manager’s Quarters occurred on ‘Berry
Bank’, ‘Mount Hesse’, ‘Gorrinn’, ‘Warrock’, ‘Leslie Manor’, ‘Carranballac’,
‘Terrinallum’, ‘Gnarpurt’, and ‘Mount Elephant’. On ‘Glenormiston’, in
1860, a design for a bluestone one-and-a-half-storey Men’s Quarters was
adopted straight out of the image in Plate XIII of The Architecture of the
Farm (1853).
Stables were also considered an important structure. An unusual sym-
metrical Gothic Revival bluestone stable (c.1860) was erected on ‘Yalla-
y-
poora’ that featured end gables, finial capped buttresses, arched
doorways, and circular vents. Further west, a well-proportioned locally
kilned rose-coloured brick stable was erected in the 1860s on ‘Murndal’
in English Colonial Georgian style, with a clock in the central gable to
garnish the structure. The brick ‘Carngham’ stable (1886) was most
remarkable in its eclectic design that featured decorative parapets with
segmental stuccoed caps, segmental arched openings with stepped
310 D. S. Jones
voussoirs, quoins, buttresses, round-headed windows with keystones, and

central round vents in the gables. On ‘Narrapumelap’, the stable (1873)
was included in the bluestone-walled enclosure service yard to the rear of
the homestead, and on ‘Gringegalgona’ a large freestone stable with hay-
loft and bluestone flagged pavings was constructed in 1873. The classic
designed stable complex, however, remained the large single-storey blue-
stone and slate roofed stable with offices (1873) at ‘Larra’ that was mod-
elled upon Scottish Border county stables or Loudon’s pattern book
instructions. With its squared coursed basalt masonry and dressings,
Gothic detailing, and detailed central gable bellcote, it harked of Gothic
traditions and Scottish equine husbandry improvement principles.
To finish the homestead in true manorial style, one needed the sweep-
ing driveway, entry gates, and gatehouse or lodge. In 1873–1876, a Gothic
gate lodge with cast iron verandah and Gothic ornamented gable barge-
boards was erected to complement the axed bluestone and Classical
wrought iron pillars and entry gates at ‘Mount Noorat’. Across at
‘Narrapumelap’ one departed by the carriage drive in 1878 past the ‘gate
and gate lodge’. The last is a pretty four-roomed cottage in the Lombardic
style, built of bluestone, with dressings of Waurn Ponds stone; a light iron
porch covers the entrance. The gates are of bronze, set in massive wrought
bluestone piers. Semi-circular walls of wrought stone, with finely adzed
caps abut on to the piers, make a fitting entrance to a gentleman’s domain.
Other homestead unit structures were diverse. In Yalla-y-Poora
Homestead (1864) and Purrumbete Homestead, from Across the Lake
(1858), ‘Dutch’ windmills were depicted pumping water from water
bodies to serve the respective homesteads, foreshadowing the introduc-
tion of bore windmills in the late 1880s. Boat houses, meat houses, sheds,
workshops, blacksmith’s, men’s and shearer’s quarters, corrugated iron
water tanks, and brick cisterns, completed a homestead compound ‘vil-
lage’ typical on most stations.
* * *
A distinguishing feature of the landscape in this time period was the evo-
lution of townships of domesticity, deity, artifice, and knowledge. These
centres shed their ‘wooden erections painted white … [or] brownish’ and
indulged in the bluestone building boom with housing, churches, com-

mercial and industrial structures, and school houses.
The arrival of church construction symbolised the domesticity of this
landscape from a primitive social structure to one of architectural expres-
sion intersecting with evangelical Protestantism. Gothic designs set the
precedent first in Geelong and then diffused through church designs into
the landscape in the mid-1860s before spreading to homestead unit
structures, and finally to the homestead itself. The bluestone Gothic
Revival Wickliffe Presbyterian Church (1861) with Waurn Ponds lime-
stone dressings, lancet windows, and slate roof erected without tower and
spire was an exception to the rule, as was the simple timber slab
Presbyterian manse, erected in 1847, colloquially called the Kilnoorat
‘church’.
Church design and construction experienced a boom from the
mid- 1860s till the mid-1870s. The Rokewood Presbyterian Church
(1865) was constructed of bluestone with freestone dressings, ‘purely
gothic’, resulting in ‘one of the neatest and most substantial structures in
any inland township in the colony’. The convertible but ‘very handsome
bluestone’ Gothic Rokewood Episcopalian Church and parsonage were
completed the next year. At Mortlake, the bluestone St Andrew’s
Presbyterian Church (1863), with its crisp bluestone spire on the but-
tressed nave, spurred construction on the nearby rectangular bluestone
Gothic Revival Methodist Church (1867) with freestone details, lancet
windows, and pinnacles. It was, however, the quaint small coursed blue-
stone ashlar Gothic Revival chapel erected at ‘Gnarpurt’ (1867), with its
lancet leadlights and panelled timber ceiling, that epitomised Scottish
piety in the landscape. Churches were constructed for greater congrega-
tions in the 1870s, with spires and towers that reached into the skies
often being added later, as separate works.
Small churches and chapels were also more common, often serving
communities of particular deities and homestead ‘villages’, such as the
chapels at ‘Gnarpurt’ and Kilnoorat. They were a substitute for the cathe-
drals of homestead dining rooms or misty woolsheds. A small brick
church and glebe erected at Condah, a small timber Anglican church was
constructed near Tahara in 1853, only to be replaced by the bluestone
Holy Trinity Church in Coleraine and the red brick St Peter’s Church of
312 D. S. Jones
England near Tahara. Larger bluestone Gothic Revival Presbyterian

churches were also erected in Beaufort, Terang, Streatham, Colac, and
Hamilton, from the 1870s until the 1910s. Many of these traditions are
captured in the delightfully picturesque Gothic bluestone Niel Black
Memorial Presbyterian Church (1883) erected at Noorat.
In the townships, while white painted or unpainted weatherboard
houses were the order, greater attention was paid to their composition.
Painting, glazed windows, picket fencing, and kitchen gardens graced
their enclosures, and straggling townships were easily identified by the
‘corrugated iron-roofing glistening in the light of the setting sun’. Clusters
of residential, commercial, and industrial structures diffused from ‘ludi-
crously wide cross-roads’ harbouring hotels, shops, flour mills, mechan-
ics’ institutes, stables, schools, churches, blacksmiths’, stores, bridges,
post and telegraph offices, banks, police stations, into a scatter of blue-
stone, red brick, weatherboard, old timber slab, bluestone rubble, and old
wattle-and-daub houses, all seeming ‘clean, neat, and prosperous’. Flour
mills, butter and cheese factories, with their tall bluestone or red brick
chimneys competed with church spires at Mortlake, Penshurst, Terang,
Kolora, Tooram, Allansford, Hamilton, Sandford, and Byaduk as land-
marks, while the newer red brick and slate roofed railway stations were of
‘spartan architecture’. Schools were often forlorn weatherboard struc-
tures, with pine plantations, surrounded by rickety fences. They were
co-opted from other structures, ‘temporarily’ moved to the site, or were
old structures ‘in a dirty state and getting rapidly destroyed by cattle and
horses’ that grazed in their unfenced reserves.
Out in the selections, in the 1870s, the ‘primitive’ style was revived.
‘Improvement’ stipulations required hasty dwelling construction requir-
ing tarpaulin or timber lean-tos. Many ‘improvements’ evolved into small
structures with timber slab walls, tussock, sedge or reed thatched roofs,
and earthen floors, as a homestead at Tarrayoukyan illustrates: ‘the first
house was very small, two rooms of wood with a canvas ceiling, … you
could see the snakes and possums on the roof at night’.
* * *
6.5 ‘Immeasurable, Grassy Plains’

All these progressive wonders were to be evolved from the lone primeval waste
upon which a solitary horseman then gazed in the autumn of l844. And the
wand of the squatter sorcerer was to do it all. I might then have seen lakelets
glittering in the sun, orchards and cornfields, barns and stables, mansion and
offices, a village in itself, the spacious wool-shed, the scientific wash-pen, had I
possessed the prophetic eye.
‘Rolf Boldrewood’, Old Melbourne Memories, 1884
* * *
In the second half of the century, the landscape was being strategically
replanted according to visions of pastoral improvement and stature.
Experimentation with grass species and works necessary to drain and
enhance pastures continued. Forested edges of the plains became scenes of
clearing activities and shelterbelt plantations were sown as if memorial
walls to past timber culling and burning errors. Newly planted soft niches
of Gardenesque and utilitarian styles protected homesteads from the harsh
‘wilderness’. The greater ‘wilderness’ had succumbed to exotic grasses, fenc-
ing, slower soil porosity levels, erratic burning routines, changes in soil fer-
tility, which all caused losses in indigenous vegetation densities and species.
After generations of incremental change, the landscape was engulfed in
a massive reorganisation of its vegetative threads. As a consequence, the
landscape was slowly finding stability and a balance in this time period.
Human roles, and relationships, sought a new mandate with the vegeta-
tion that would be carried into and through the new century—the seeds
of these signatures were sown with dreams of aristocratic estates.
The grassland mosaic dominated by Kangaroo Grass, in a semi-open
woodland of River Red Gum, Silver Banksia, Drooping Sheoak, Cherry
Ballart, Blackwood and Manna Gum shifted between 1860 and 1900,
found refuge in islands under threat by a tide of sheep and exotic grasses.
The grassland was perceived as a rich fodder base for over a century, but
the associated lightly spread upper and middle storeys were even more
quickly subsumed in the passage of change.
314 D. S. Jones
This section considers this change. The survey includes new directions
in pasture improvement, shelterbelts, homestead enrichment to protect
the structure from microclimatic impacts, and an overview of vegetation
lost from the original landscape. The ‘wand of the squatter sorcerer’ recast
the ‘primeval waste’ into a utilitarian landscape of pastoral downs and
prairie grasslands. The ‘prophetic eye’ had come into fruition. ‘But Fate
held her secrets closely then as now. Only the vast eucalyptus forest,
stretching unbroken to the horizon, waved its sombre banner before’ as a
remaining vestige of hegemony over the landscape.
* * *
The children of the Romantic Age warmed to a spirit of kinship yet

dependency upon the landscape. The passage of time had lessened illu-
sions of silence and strangeness into a landscape that held legibility and
structure, yet harboured ‘Eucalyptian’ emblems of the interior. The
‘Children of the Rock’ had been vanquished, and their country restruc-
tured and moulded in Arcadian lines, colours, and islands for the benefit
of the sheep imperative. The surface was sown with seeds of tomorrow’s
dreams and yesterday’s realities, but still retained its myths. A ‘new sense
of vision’ based around a ‘settled rural countryside not a primeval wilder-
ness’ developed in this time period.
In two views of the Wannon Valley, Muntham (c.1860) and Wando
Vale Homestead (1876), there is a relaxation of the pastoral tradition in
sweeping views that use the homestead and garden as focal pivots. It is a
landscape of ‘rolling, open downs, thickly grassed, soil evidently of the
very best quality’. Clearing and fencing has been achieved, native trees
and shrubs remained as a veneer screen and new botanic islands had
appeared. In both paintings, the ‘paradise … country’ was still present:
‘rolling downs’ of open grasses and picturesque ‘clusters [and belts] of red
gum trees’ traced serpentine watercourses or covered hilltops.
Our track winds along the uplands on the north bank of the Wannon. Far as
the eye can reach extends the open country of rolling downs. The river’s course is
traced by the dark fringe of timber in the valley beneath us. There are as lovely
glens here as in the [Scottish] Highlands, which, in many respects, the country
much resembles.
The images captured ‘farm-houses built after English fashion, well-

cared for crops, and ever-widening lines of fencing’, and pasture grasses
of differing heights and shades. Amidst these deciduous fresh greens and
sombre funereal olive colours cast silhouettes against the natural golden
yellows, and ‘burnish’d’ reds and grey-greens are displayed in Waterpool
Near Coleraine (1869) and Coleraine and a Waterpool (1871). The land-
scape of the late 1880s portrayed a park-like structure but was strategi-
cally replanted with grasses and trees to enhance the pastoral ideal.
Around Hamilton, the landscape was ‘open level fields … everywhere
covered with pasturage’. Young, linear ‘shelter plantations’ of Monterey
Pine marked edges of numerous roadside or paddock boundaries or were
beacons in many ‘tastefully laid-out’ homestead gardens. Each homestead
nurtured an avenue of trees along its carriage drive, a ‘well-stocked
orchard’, and a water retention basin that merged into a bird refuge with
verge shelter vegetation. On the horizon, the ‘church spires and towers’ of
Hamilton rose over an English knoll of foliage around which the Grange
Burn wound.
The swampy ‘thickly-verdured’ meadows around Bessiebelle had been
burnt, furrowed, and dissected by drains. The ‘pathless waste’ had been
changed, Manna and Swamp Gum and the ‘umbrageous blackwood’
ringbarked, land fenced, and seeds of barley and oats sown. Lines and
clumps of timber lay stacked ‘for burning in autumn’, and in the valleys
‘green rivage, [‘Eumeralla West’] homestead, rose garden and grass lawn
trimshaven’ … [nestled near] the winding stream shining ‘neath the
actinic rays of the sun like a gigantic silver serpent’.
Around ‘Kangatong’, ‘Minjah’, and ‘Quamby’, the ‘heavily timbered,
rough country‘ had been replaced by pastures of wheat, lucerne, and
grass. These paddocks were lined by young plantations of cypress,
Monterey Pines, and Blue Gums. Swamps had been drained, Blackwood
and eucalypt ringbarked and cleared, and homesteads such as ‘The Union’
or ‘Injemira’ surrounded with shelter plantations and new gardens. Only
the banks of Spring and Blackwood Creeks and the Moyne carried ves-
tiges of Manna and Swamp Gums, Blackwood, tea-tree and reedy edges
unless ploughed over by bullock teams to create deeper linear drainage
channels. In some areas, the clearing was so extensive that ‘you could see
for miles on every side, to where the earth met the sky’.
316 D. S. Jones
Around Hexham and Caramut, the open plains had lost most of the
‘honeysuckle’ to firewood and fencing timber. Clumps and lines of young
Monterey Pines, cypresses, and Blue Gums marked a landscape that still
harboured native grasses in sheep pastures. Only isolated eucalypts
marked the plains, but stands of Swamp and Manna Gums thrived in the
serpentine Muston’s Creek and Hopkins River.
On the plains of ‘Wooriwyrite’, the open woodland of banksia, Manna
Gum and Blackwood had been extensively thinned. Pastures had been
fenced and sown with rye grass and clover, and only youthful clumps or
plantations of pine, cypress, and Blue Gum greenery at ‘Wooriwyrite’,
‘Stony Point’, ‘Eddington’, ‘The Gums’ and ‘West Cloven Hills’ marked
the scene. Some swamp drainage and stream channel construction had
been undertaken but the eucalypt-lined Mt Emu Creek still wound through
the landscape questioning the now barren Mt Meningoort and Mt Koang.
By the 1880s, Mt Noorat had been heavily thinned, and young planta-
tions of pines, elms, and oaks adorned its flanks. The landscape now
depicted an open park-like appearance with numerous ageing River Red
and Manna Gums. Deciduous and exotic lines, avenues, and clumps had
also been introduced to colour the scene, creating the ‘most English look-
ing place in the colonies’, reminiscent of Oxfordshire or Wiltshire.
In the ‘garden’ around Camperdown and ‘Purrumbete’, ‘all around are
the rich pastures of the Manifold estate, clover and rye grass paddocks,
dotted with lightwood, on which oxen and sheep by the thousand fatten
and make wool’. Paddocks of rye grass, clover, and lucerne were separated
by youthful cypress plantations, patches of thistles waved in the breezes,
a light cover of Manna Gum and Blackwood graced grassy slopes on Mt
Leura, and dense islands of greenery identified ‘Purrumbete’, ‘Talindert’,
Basin Banks and other homesteads. Watercourses and depressions had
been drained and only limited clearing of remnant trees and shrubs was
in progress.
On the open plains, centred upon Cressy, the ‘bright verdure of exotic
vegetation … [against] the more sombre tints of the eucalyptus or the
blackwood’ indicated lonely homesteads isolated in a sea of extensive
Kangaroo and Wallaby grassed paddocks. Destitute elderly sheoak or
banksia fought with the wind, newly planted cypress hedges struggled in
the gales, and Prickly Moses trembled on rocky knobs and rises.
Around ‘Larra’, ‘Gala’, and ‘Titanga’, the open woodland had vanished
into a patchwork of extensive Blue Gum and cypress plantations. Only a
scattered remnant of River Red Gums, Blackwoods and sheoaks rocked
in a sea of native and introduced pasture grasses. The ‘swagman’s light-
house’, Mt Elephant, was still covered in Blackwoods and Drooping
Sheoaks that could provide for bonfires, while native Everlasting Daisies
found refuge in plantation strips. Along the sheltered watercourses of
Brown’s Waterholes, Mundy’s Gully, Mt Emu Creek, Gnarkeet Chain of
Ponds and around the edges of Lakes Tooliorook, Logan, and Gnarpurt
elderly Blackwood or ‘lightwood’, Drooping Sheoak, Silver Banksia,
Cherry Ballart, Sweet Bursaria, Late Black Wattle, and River Red Gum
found refuge from changes occurring on the grasslands.
From ‘Baangal’ northwards to ‘Challicum’, the landscape shifted from
extensive Blue Gum and cypress plantations to rolling open downs of
Wallaby and Kangaroo Grasses. The northern areas had been extensively
cleared of River Red Gum, banksias, Cherry Ballart, and Drooping
Sheoak, and only new islands of homestead gardens or linear strips of
‘sorrowful‘ eucalypts fringed Fiery, Broken, and Mt Emu Creeks and
occasional lakes. Some swamps had been drained, and around home-
steads and paddocks at such as ‘Carranballac’, ‘St Enochs’, ‘Eurambeen’,
‘Yalla-y-poora’, ‘Banongil’, ‘Baangil’, ‘Borriyalloak’, and ‘Mount Emu’,
enriched gardens were growing.
Below Gariwerd, the ‘sparsely-wooded, pastoral country’ was graced by
‘stately red-gum trees … [with] magnificent trunks and gnarled and
spreading branches’.
* * *
The desire for pasture improvement continued in this time period. Land
clearance practices shifted to exotic grass experimentation to increase pas-
ture qualities. It also involved further drainage of swamps to increase
pasture coverage. Native grasses were still familiar fodder in many areas
before the major application of fertilisers and exotic annual weedy grass
and herb seeds, but intensive grazing disturbance had ensured their
demise. There were still further landscape manipulations and re-sowings
to achieve a shift in vegetation focus towards the monocultural support
of sheep.
318 D. S. Jones
Large tracts of native grasses were still popular browsing fodder before
1900. Dominated by Kangaroo, Tussock, Spear, and Wallaby grasses,
these tracts had only been partially affected by changes from intensive
defoliation, trampling, and manuring of vegetation and soil by sheep and
cattle. The enclosure of paddocks concentrated sheep browsing and ‘drift’
into fodder resource areas and movement routes, leading to a greater
impact upon vegetation and soils than that experienced previously in
open sheep walks. Thick Kangaroo Grass was still extant around Colac,
and on ‘Mount Hesse’ ‘wallaby grass, a little kangaroo grass and large
areas of “blue devil” or chalicum’ commanded most pastures, especially
in the ‘tiger country’ of the stony rises. ‘St Enochs’ was also dominated by
rich native grasses.
Tall Summer growing perennial native grasses were still the primary
fodder but their primacy was beginning to be eroded by introduced exotic
grasses, shorter Winter growing perennial native grasses and herbs, and
cereal crops. By 1882, 400 ha of ‘Eurack’ was under lucerne, on ‘Mount
Hesse’ paddocks of English grasses had been sown before 1882, and pas-
tures of rye grass with oats on ‘Barunah Plains’ continued to flourish.
Paspalum with rye grass was experimented with on ‘Berry Bank’, and by
1872, regular harvests of lucerne produced more than adequate ensilage
enabling sales of seeds by the bushel. Lucerne was also regularly harvested
on ‘Golf Hill’ and ‘Mount Noorat‘ by the 1870s, and White Clover was
gaining a hold on the pastures of ‘The Sisters’ and ‘Glenormiston’. At
‘Murndal’, cocksfoot, rye grass, Yorkshire Fog, cow grass, and rib grass
seeds were ordered from seed merchants in Melbourne in 1885.
The breadth of experimentation with wheat strains was illustrated on
‘Barunah Plains’ and ‘Mount Hesse’. The latter, in 1878, was sowing
Fenton, Square Head, Scotch Wheat, Mt Gambier, and Purple Straw seeds.
On newly reclaimed swamps at Bessiebelle ‘many excellent harvests’ of
barley, oats, and wheat were being reaped. Oaten hay, oats, barley, and
other crops were successfully harvested on ‘Golf Hill’ and ‘Mount Noorat’
in the 1870s, and along the Grange Burn in the 1880s excellent crops of
wheat, oats and other cereal crops were harvested on stations such as
‘Hamilton Downs’ and ‘Langford’. At ‘The Hill’, fields of potatoes,
lucerne, barley, rape, oats, turnips, ‘corn newly cut … stacked in sheaves’,
‘real hay, [and] real haycocks’, greeted a visitor in 1885.
Planting cycles started in early winter when oaten hay and oats were
sown; in late winter, wheat and barley were sown. Summer was when the
harvest was gathered, hay stacks built, and sheep set loose on the crop
stubble. Ploughing and harrowing were used to encourage seed germina-
tion and cereal crop rotation. Ploughing with bullocks in single furrows
progressively gave way to horse ploughing that furrowed chain [20.11 m]
wide belts and gave the opportunity to sow entire paddocks of grasses and
cereal crops. Improved plough machinery also permitted the easier drain-
ing and harrowing of drainage depressions and swamps.
Drainage of swamps, begun in the 1840s around Kolora and Killarney,
became a major activity between 1870 and 1885. In 1867, brick tunnel
drains nearly 40 m long were cut under architectural supervision to drain
a 485 ha swamp on ‘Barunah Plains’, demonstrating the technical knowl-
edge and expense involved in early exercises. In the 1870s, an ‘unhealthy
swamp, … a hotbed of diseases’ in tea-tree was drained in the Mortlake
township, a long square slab tunnel was constructed to drain swamps on
‘St Enochs’, dynamiting of channels through the stony rises started on
‘Dunmore’, and a major programme of swamp drainage began in 1883
on ‘Mount Hesse’.
The 1880s witnessed major swamp drainage and vegetation clearance
indenture schemes around Bessiebelle and Condah Swamp localities, cre-
ating ‘Glengleeson’, ‘Moyne Falls’, and ‘Stonefield’ stations. By 1890,
almost £10,000 and £6000 had been expended on the Lower Eumeralla
and Condah Swamps to reclaim over 1220 ha and 526 ha respectively.
Drainage works continued on ‘Dunmore’ in the 1890s by ‘burning the
high thick tussock growth‘ and then furrowing channels to drain excess
water. These areas subsequently proved valuable in the cultivation of bar-
ley, oats, and wheat, without fertilisers. Drainage works also affected the
downstream capacities of larger swamps or lakes, such as Lakes Learmonth,
Corangamite, Burrumbeet, Modeware, and Lough Calvert, thereby
increasing their levels and potential for flooding adjacent farmlands.
Clearing and ringbarking of trees and scrub continued in the District
but was restricted to heathlands, scrub woodlands, tracts in the stony
rises, or with swamp reclamation works. Lands in the Timboon, Mt
Napier, and Curdies River Valley localities were heavily selected and
cleared in the late 1870s, and extensive clearing and swamp drainage
320 D. S. Jones
works by axe, fire, and ringbarking carved ‘Glengleeson’, ‘Moyne Falls’,

and ‘Stonefield’ stations out from extensive scrub forests around
Bessiebelle and ‘Dunmore’. On ‘Dunmore’, fire and ringbarking were
commonly used in clearing swampy tussock growth, ‘big gums and high
bracken’ on the station: ‘My father spent a lot of money getting the trees
ringbarked and then each year the men collected the fallen branches and
heaped them at the butts of dead trees for burning in the autumn’.
The practice of ringbarking, at that time, was endorsed by prominent
scientists ‘as a quick, economical way of drying and sweetening the soil
and thus effecting a cure’. Trees cleared were usually burnt. On
‘Purrumbete’ in 1882, this practice was included as a contractual require-
ment upon tenants where ‘all the farm [had] to be cleared … of all tim-
ber’ and burnt off over a two-year period. River Red Gum timber was
especially prized by the saw milling industry for use in railway sleepers,
fencing, bridges, wharf pilings, commercial firewood, and for the block-
ing of trolley car roadways. Sawmills in the Victoria Valley and near Mt
Cole, for example, provided many of the River Red Gum sleepers for
railway construction around Hamilton.
* * *
In contrast to the clearing and razing of native vegetation, there was an

attempt to nurture trees in the form of shelterbelts. Linear belts of mainly
Blue and Sugar Gums and Pine and Cypress were planted, reminiscent of
English and Scottish enclosure plantations and woodlots, in an attempt
to provide wind dispersion and shade from the heat. Plantings appear to
have been deliberately and independently started in different localities.
Imposing unnatural solid forms and lines on the landscape, they often
paralleled paddock and title boundaries becoming a signature of the
landscape by 1900.
In 1851, the first Blue Gum plantations were sown from pot-grown
seedlings on ‘Larra’ around the homestead, and in 1879 about a hectare
was sown in a boundary paddock enclosure plot. Between June and
August 1876 Blue Gum hand seed broadcasting in 20 m wide farrowed
beds was found to be successful: 283 gms per hectare mixed with damp-
ened wood ash proved a reliable recipe on ‘Titanga’. Consequently,
between 1880 and 1895 extensive plantations were established around

Lismore on ‘Larra’, ‘Terrinallum’, ‘Mount Bute’, ‘Wooriwyrite’, ‘Mount
Elephant’, ‘Titanga’, ‘Gala’, and ‘Gnarpurt’, encouraging later plantings
across the District. By 1898, some 702.9 ha of Blue Gum, wattle, and
pine had seeded in plantation enclosures on ‘Larra’, ‘Titanga’, and ‘Gala’,
with the busiest planting period being from 1885 to 1895. Experiments
with other species of gum, wattle, sheoak and pine, as both specimen and
plantation trees, were also carried out in the 1880s but Sugar Gums
proved to be the most successful. Hedge Wattle was planted along road-
sides from the 1870s and Sugar Gums were being sown as a successor to
Blue Gums by 1895. By 1910, some 607 ha of Blue and Sugar Gum,
sheoak and wattle plantations were growing on ‘Gnarpurt’. All these
plantations foreshadowed their adaptation as ceremonial tree avenues in
the 1910s and 1920s.
Knowledge of successful plantation experiments also spread to other
stations. On ‘Gnarpurt’, ‘Robertson’s Forest‘ evolved from the enclosure
of some original sheoak trees. Some 200 pines were planted in belts in
1864 across ‘Carranballac’ in an act deemed ‘indicative of a position on
the part of landowners to bear their part in enforesting the country with
a view to the amelioration of the climate’. Extensive plantations of Sugar
Gums were also established on ‘Baangal’ and ‘Banongill’ to provide wind
shelter for stock and grain cultivation experiments, and to provide wood
supplies. On a community reserve at Mt Fyans, Blue Gums were exten-
sively planted in the late 1870s for firewood supplies. From 1870 Blue
Gums, and later Sugar Gums, were directly sown in 20 m and or 40m
wide strips on ‘Stony Point’ by a ‘single forough mouldboard plough
drawn by two horses’ creating nearly 200 ha of plantations on the
2,075 ha station. Sugar Gums were also planted along the Rokewood
roadsides in the 1890s, along paddock edges on ‘Mount Hesse’, and on
‘Tarndwarncoort’ T- and I-shaped plantations were sown to reduce sheep
stress and ‘drift’. On ‘Meningoort’, ‘Narrapumelap’, ‘Ercildoune’, ‘Mount
Noorat’, and ‘Purrumbete’, Blue, Sugar and River Red Gums, English
Oaks, and ‘Pinus Insignis’ were planted to garnish driveway approaches
to these stations.
In Wannon Valley ornamental plantations of elms, oaks, Monterey
Pines, and cypresses were sown as early as 1860. On ‘Murndal’ they
322 D. S. Jones
radiated out from the homestead site and paralleled the main driveways.
Imported Blue Gum and Wannon Valley River Red Gum seedlings were
also successfully planted in 1895 along ‘Murndal’s’ entry drive and in
‘The Regiment’. In contrast to the plains of Lismore, these plantings were
linked to a greater vision to create an aesthetic Gardenesque landscape
rather than to reduce wind and heat stress for sheep.
* * *
Another signature of the landscape was the dense green islands estab-
lished around homesteads. As campsites acquired a sense of permanency,
bush timber shelters gave way to bluestone structures that were sur-
rounded by gardens. Like Aboriginal practices of campsite enrichment,
these enclavés nurtured species recalling English and Scottish manor gar-
dens. Plantings were made to both limit micro-climatic impacts, and to
complement newly erected ‘manor houses’ or mansions. Homestead gar-
dens became soft Arcadian refuges from the plains, symbolic of its token
defeat. Only fragments of this Arcadian agenda were planted in township
streets.
The verandah, a trait of homesteads, provided the pivotal orientation
for garden and landscape plantings. Verandahs at ‘Purrumbete’, ‘Renny
Hill’, ‘Monivae’, ‘Gringegalgona’, ‘Baroona’, ‘Langi Willi’, and ‘Merino
Downs’ figure as enchanting places framed in Running Postman, Purple
Coral Pea, English Ivy, vines, Passion-flowers, Jessamines, and magnolias
from where one could gaze out and survey the landscape beyond. The
transitional middle ground was filled with specimen deciduous and ever-
green trees, shrubs and hedges of numerous plant varieties, flowers, fruit
trees, and gracious clover-grassed lawns, all framing green spaces within
and ‘windows’ out into the landscape. The journey sequence to the home-
stead became an expression of the picturesque ideal with sweeping drive-
ways, controlled and enframed vistas, ornamental gates, and tree-lined
avenues. The previously important utilitarian orchards and vegetable gar-
dens were banished from these Arcadian settings to spaces behind the
homestead. An Arcadian image was constructed out of green foliage to
shut out the realities of the landscape, and symbolically to ornament per-
sonal domains.
Within these gardens, horticultural specialisation and experimentation

became the objectives for homestead site enrichment activities. Graziers
planted exotic as well as Australian and New Zealand species to decorate
their gardens and to recall their mixed allegiances to European and
Australian landscapes.
Around Camperdown, the older stations continued to construct
homestead gardens, but in a grander manner. At ‘Purrumbete’, ‘Talindert’,
‘Wooriwyrite’, ‘Meningoort’, ‘Koort-koort-nong’, ‘Ercildoune’, and
‘Renny Hill’, maturing oak, pine, Blue Gum or wattle lined curved or
linear driveways that fed into English grassed compounds enclosed by
commonly selected trees and shrubs as well as English and Irish Yew,
palms. These gardens included flower beds of annuals such as Verbenas,
viburnums, and rhododendrons, as well as fern trees, hawthorn hedges,
Sweet Briar roses, grapes, and the ubiquitous rose garden. These scenes
were captured in von Guérard’s canvases of Purrumbete from Across the
Lake (1858), From the Verandah of Purrumbete (1858), and Meningoort,
Camperdown (1861). Landscape came into and directed the overall space:
‘Meningoort’ exploited a visual axis to distant Mt Leura by the imposi-
tion of a linear avenue of Blue Gums, while ‘Purrumbete’ and ‘Renny
Hill’ sought to enframe their vistas over Lakes Purrumbete and Bullen
Merri, and ‘Talindert’ taunted with a visual axis between Mt Porndon
and Mt Leura.
The pleasure park of Basin Banks, which evolved into the regional
botanic gardens for the Camperdown area, exploited this relationship by
enabling public engagement with the landscape in a botanical setting
planted from a similar vegetative schedule. Created on 1.2 ha, it was
designed with ‘smooth walks, soft springy lawns, beds of flowers, and a
miniature grove of pines’.
The homesteads of the open treeless plains around Mt Gellibrand and
Rokewood sought to dispel their ‘desolate dreary’ landscapes in garden
refuges. ‘The country here would be unbearable dreary were it not for the
sunshine and fine climate. There are wide plains all round us and not
much to see outside the garden [at “Mount Hesse”] which is a very
pretty one’.
At ‘Tarndwarncoort’, ‘Uondo’, ‘Berry Bank’, ‘Barunah Plains’,
‘Polmenna’, ‘Mooleric’, ‘Cororooke House’, and ‘Mount Hesse’, gardens
324 D. S. Jones
provided protection from the sun and the wind. In these, enclosure
gained primacy over the aesthetics of sweeping drives or direct views
commonly selected. Upper storey species, as well as palms, encircled
sweeping lawns fringed by commonly selected sheltered beds of flowering
shrubs as well as wall-flowers, pink lilies, hawthorn and South African
Boxthorn hedges, English Box, hot-houses full of Amaryllis Lilies, bego-
nias, grapes, gloxinias, and tree ferns. Fruit orchards of apples, pears, and
the ubiquitous kitchen and rose gardens, often with prized melons, were
positioned on more sheltered sides of the homestead. The garden at ‘The
Hill’, with distant views over Lake Colac, surrounding a ‘pleasant coun-
try house’ was planted with English Oak, Monkey Puzzle Tree, palm,
Monterey Pine, poplar, Norfolk Island Pine, and Blue Gum to shelter
numerous flowering shrubs, ‘the green springy turf of the broad lawns’,
the flower beds, and the apple and pear orchards.
On the open plains, from Lismore across to Penshurst, shelter from the
winds was the primary criteria in garden establishment, although original
homestead positions in sheltered valleys provided some relief. Around
Lismore extensive Blue and Sugar Gum plantations dispersed winds,
fringed paddocks, and lined curvilinear driveways. Plantations also shel-
tered homesteads at ‘Larra’, ‘Gala’, ‘Blythvale’, ‘Stony Point’, ‘Titanga’,
‘Banongill’, ‘Eurambeen’, ‘Mount Elephant’, and ‘Ercildoune’. Valley
sites also sheltered homesteads at ‘Narrapumelap’, ‘Yalla-y-poora’,
‘Mawallok’, ‘Challicum’, ‘Merrang’, ‘Langi Willi’, ‘Trawalla’, and ‘St
Enochs’, enhancing sweeping driveways as captured in Yalla-y-Poora
Homestead (1864). Within a protective shell of commonly selected trees
included Pittosporum spp., birch, ash, maple, wattle, Melaleuca spp., pine,
and palms sheltered English lawns full of commonly selected trees as well
as English Box, hawthorn hedges, and flower beds of Buddleia spp., blue-
bells, jonquils, daffodils, espaliered fruit trees, grapes, Grevillea spp., per-
simmons, lilacs, crab apples, laurustinus, and Osage Oranges.
In the homestead gardens of ‘Glenormiston’, ‘Marida Yallock’, ‘Mount
Noorat’, ‘The Bend’, ‘Eeyeuk’, and ‘Dalvui’, around Mt Noorat, topo-
graphical conditions reduced the ravages of winds so designs sought to
exploit vistas or to create ‘windows’ into the landscape. Siting, or the
potential to re-site and take advantage of the landscape, by new home-
steads, was an integral criterion in garden location and arrangement: this
was especially so at ‘Mount Noorat’ and ‘Chatsworth House’. Of these

gardens, ‘Mount Noorat’ was the most ambitious in its 60 ha parkland
plantations, English Elm tree avenues, and eighteenth-century pictur-
esque tree clumps and perimeter belts. This garden was
in a saucer-shaped hollow about two acres [0.8 ha] in extent, and the soil is
excellently suited for the purpose … Almost all kinds of trees and flowers thrive
luxuriantly, the growth of most of the plantations having been exceptionally
rapid. The plantations, & c., round the house are about 35 acres [14.2 ha] in
extent, and they are varied in character. As is very often the case in Victoria, the
Pinus insignis has been very largely used to form the main body of the planta-
tions, but there are deciduous trees in abundance as well … The walks are nearly
all bordered with English primroses, which grow in the utmost luxuriance.
River Red Gums and Manna Gums were retained in the gardens around
Mt Noorat. New species were also added, including the commonly
selected species, cedars, palms, Lilly-pillies, magnolias, conservatories full
of ferns, palms, orchids, grapes, and numerous herbaceous plants such as
Lily-of-the-Valley, irises, Acanthus, Cape Plumbago, the ever-popular
climbing and shrub roses, and English Box bordered flower beds.
In the sheltered Wannon Valley and the ‘Red Gum Country’ the crite-
ria for homestead landscape were towards aesthetic and scientific direc-
tions rather than considerations of winds and heat minimisation. River
Red Gums, an important species, were entwined in homestead gardens at
‘Inverary’, ‘Warrock’, ‘Koolomurt’, ‘Wando Vale’, ‘Prestonholme’,
‘Warrock’, ‘Langford’, ‘Monivae’, ‘Vasey’, ‘Murndal’, and ‘Gringegalgona’.
Apart from the last two, these gardens were more formal and traditional
with an upper storey of commonly selected species cypresses, River Red
Gums, conifers, banksias, cedars, Norfolk Island Hibiscus, gleditsias,
Angels’ Trumpets, orchards of apples and pears, and shrubs and climbers
such as viburnums, Beauty-bush, and Euonymus.
While ‘Murndal’ is not typical of District homestead gardens, the pro-
files of gardens in the Camperdown and Mt Noorat areas, and at
‘Gringegalgona’ and ‘Cororooke House’ were. Here were surreal enclo-
sures in a state of partial completion, ‘of neatness about the paths, and of
close-shorn trimness about the plots and lawns’ that were retreats from
the harshness of the pastoral landscape. Representations of English or
326 D. S. Jones
Scottish manor houses and ‘parkes’, transposed on an unforgiving land-

scape, all used a heavy exotic plant palette many species of which were
proclaimed as noxious weeds by 1900.
Like rabbits, the seeds of plant species readily unconsciously or delib-
erately diffused across the landscape. Of these, European hedge and sym-
bolic plants were sown or grafted as part of the colonial acclimatisation
charter, without a thought about their potential landscape effects. Species,
such as Gorse, Boxthorn, Sweet Briar, blackberries, and hawthorns were
all introduced as hedge species reminiscent of South African, English and
Scottish paddock landscapes. Thistles, including the Slender, Scotch or
Spear, and Variegated, were imported as medicinal plants or accidentally
in pasture seed or horse feed and quickly became a nuisance. Ironically
only one native species, the finely thorned Acacia Hedge that was used in
many hedges, was proclaimed as ‘noxious’ in some shires.
On ‘Murndal’, from the 1860s, hawthorns, Boxthorn, and Osage
Orange were extensively planted. Selected as substitutes for wire fencing
in paddocks and around the homestead, as well as for ornamental pur-
poses, some 5000–6500 plants were required for a kilometre length. They
became senescent in time, but thistles raised their spectre on both
‘Murndal’ and ‘Purrumbete’ in the late 1870s taking over tracts of the
Wannon River flats, the ‘Leura Paddock’ and rabbiting paddocks, respec-
tively. Thistles were a threat much earlier in other localities, such as on
‘Blackwood’, ‘Dunmore’, and ‘Lake Condah’, in the 1850s, making nec-
essary the hire of thistle cutters or parties of men ‘to cut down the this-
tles’. On ‘Mount Noorat’, in 1863, they were perceived as ‘a less
formidable evil than I once thought—as they are only Biennials and will
die after a few cuttings’. In the late 1880s and 1890s, ‘eye-contenting
hedges of commingled new-gold and old-gold’ Gorse divided many pad-
docks on ‘Ercildoune’, and hawthorn hedges enclosed many dairy pad-
docks around Tooram, Lake Keilambete, and Woodford, the ‘sweet
perfume of whose flowers fills the air’.
* * *
Indicative of this plant acclimatisation process was a notional sense of com-

prehension and patience with the wraths of nature. Graziers and the plains
communities instead sought to redress these fires, floods, plagues, and

droughts by seeking to alter their frequency and pattern. In so doing, they
often concentrated the natural impacts at more infrequent intervals. Such
events became accepted as routine events associated with the landscape.
In pockets of the landscape kangaroos still roamed and browsed in
open woodland remnants or frequented and competed for new pastures
with the new pioneer, sheep. Enclaves of vegetation in the Stony Rises,
around Mt Eccles and Mt Napier, in the valley edges around Gariwerd,
and on the open woodland grasses of ‘Quamby’ and ‘Wickham Park’
provided shelter from kangaroo culling exercises.
The frequency and power of bushfires was ameliorated. Constrained by
cool burns and mown fire breaks, bushfires were rarer events but more force-
ful by their absence. Clearing processes hastened the risk of bushfires.
‘Glengleeson’ suffered two serious fires between 1878 and 1882 due to
hoarding of timber for Autumn burning sessions. There were also the delib-
erate, natural, and accidental firings of landscapes. Mt Noorat served as an
important fire lookout against deliberate incendiary incidents. Chief among
these incidents were the numerous fires ignited at camps left by sundowners
and swagmen, or lit by train engines. ‘Accidental’ bushfires, for example,
ravaged paddocks on ‘Purrumbete’ and ‘Tandarook’ in March 1878, and
fires burnt the Spring Hill-’Mount Bute’-’Berry Bank’ locality in 1890.
As droughts declined in their intensity stations constructed numerous dams
to retain water, and the emblematic windmill began to adopt the landscape.
Windmills appeared in the 1880s, and the first bores were put down on ‘Larra’
in 1885. Notwithstanding these precautions, the occupants of ‘Mount Hesse’
were ‘panic stricken’ by the absence of water during the drought of 1897–1898.
A drought hampered wool washing around ‘Boortkoi’ in 1877, but the ‘severe
droughts’ in the mid-1880s and 1891 were financially the worst for the plains
as they coincided with falling wool prices.
Because of attempts to retain water that reduced the cycles and impacts
of droughts, flooding was less a problem. Wets were always a delight after
a drought, their richness obviating any damage they caused. Floods rav-
aged the Hopkins River, and Mt Emu and Salt Creeks in 1870, and the
1884–1885 summer season was ‘most unprecedented, cold with much
rain’ promoting grass growth. In October 1894, ‘fences and [sheep]
bridges were carried away on all the stations through which the Lismore
328 D. S. Jones
[Brown’s Waterholes] and Mundy’s Gully Creeks flow’ caused by a

26-hour steady downpour in which 10.16 cm fell. Frequent floods and
rains also regularly disrupted pastoral exhibitions at Skipton in the 1860s
and 1870s. In the Wannon Valley, concerns about soil erosion decreased
as the war upon hillside rabbit burrows, leaving creek beds such as Bush
Creek, Coleraine (1874) to erode as natural landscape patterns, were more
important issues.
The vine louse, Phylloxera vastatrix, proved the major threat in the
District. Between 1875 and 1885 the vine growing industry was ruined,
with vines being harrowed, burnt, and trenched to prevent phylloxera from
spreading. The only mention of plague was caterpillars eating on the pas-
tures of ‘Purrumbete’ in 1878, and around Ellerslie on ‘Barna’ in 1880.
* * *
While it is easy to conceptually recreate the vegetation mosaic of the

landscape in 1830 or 1900, it is much harder to gauge loss of plant spe-
cies without botanical surveys. Most botanical investigations up to the
1880s consisted of hurried excursions, where only a cursory botanical
profile was obtained, and consequently only a few grassland community
species were identified as extinct or endangered.
Up to 1900 much of the tall Summer perennial grassland community,
dominated by Kangaroo Grass, was in large remnant tracts in the District.
These were, however, under threat from ploughing, overgrazing, manur-
ing, plant succession, excessive trampling and soil compaction, and the
disruption of burning regimes. Substantive loss of the communities,
however, did not occur until 1900 to 1950 when improved seed strains
and the use of fertilisers markedly shifted the grassland structure to exotic
annuals and sown pasture grasses. Loss of the Kangaroo, Wallaby, and
Spear Grass communities was noticed but not perceived as a problem,
given its ready replacement with richer pasture grasses. Indeed, the most
striking impact of the wool industry has been the virtual elimination of
Kangaroo Grass and allied perennial species from the grassland commu-
nity. This was a trend well advanced in the District by 1900.
There were also other impacts. Most extensive and equally alarming
was the loss of Drooping Sheoak, Cherry Ballart and Silver Banksia on
the plains by 1900. The ‘natural openness’ of the plains today is a myth,
as all sheoak, Cherry Ballart, and banksia species were spread randomly
across the landscape. There are numerous reports of their ‘stunted’ or
shapely forms in the District between 1836 and c.1850, implying their
common occurrence. The trees appear to have disappeared rapidly
between 1840 and 1870 by felling for firewood, fence posts, hut walls
and roofing bark, or by over-grazed by sheep, bullocks and cattle.
Manuring and soil compaction by tramping probably also contributed to
their disappearance. Lack of seeding and regeneration also denied their
continued existence except in lonely unmade Government Road reserves,
stream reserves, railroad reserves, or plantation strips.
Associated with this pattern was the absence of young River Red Gum
saplings due to the same threats of overgrazing, disruption of fire regimes,
firewood, timber burning and culling, and lack of ‘unconquered’ growing
spaces. Thus, only mature specimens thrived in 1900, and minimal
encouragement was given to their continued random open woodland
style of growth. They were only permitted to regenerate in controlled
environments such as homestead gardens and plantation strips.
* * *
6.6 Domains of Jumbucks

It is the general opinion that the country has improved much by being stocked,
and I have no doubt it has to a certain extent, but I think it is more the result
of the change of the seasons. … It is the change of seasons, and not the stock, that
has changed the appearance if the country.
Letter, November 1, 1853, Thomas Chirnside, ‘Werribee Park’, Point
Cook, to Charles LaTrobe, Melbourne
* * *
At the turn of the century, the new federation celebrated the emu and
kangaroo as symbols on its coat of arms. By immortalising these
330 D. S. Jones
corporeal animals, it forgot the wasteland of animal loss left in the colo-
nial wake. While the species of fauna and avifauna can be readily identi-
fied, it was the circumstances of their extinction or decline that has not
readily been reconciled in the District. It was not simply that they were
senescent, rather it was the massive damage wrought to their habitats, the
sharp destabilisation of an equilibrium in their hunting and foraging rela-
tionships, increased competition for food sources with introduced spe-
cies, and that like Aboriginals, they were simply cast off their territory,
often in a distant field of murder (1990).
Four aspects are addressed in this section. First, the nature and affects
of specialisation in animal ‘management’ with the introduction of, espe-
cially, sheep. Second, the crisis caused by the introduced rabbit to animal
husbandry practices. Third, a survey of the fauna and avifauna potentially
removed from this landscape between 1800 and 1900. And fourth, the
range of fauna and avifauna that survived the onslaught often in dis-
placed, enhanced or created habitats. The purpose of this section is to
qualify the impact of change upon fauna and avifauna that inhabited the
plains between 1800 and 1900 over this time period, noting habitat rela-
tionships, and the influence these changes may have had in shaping the
landscape’s character.
* * *
The imprint of the sheep wrought the greatest changes on the symbolic
and environmental composition of the Western District landscape. A key
impact was the near extinction of the savannah grassland ecosystem. The
fundamental weaknesses of sheep were their failure to replenish the earth’s
fertility, the substitution of a vibrant ecosystem for one of monoculture,
and the changes to the biological structure and surface of the landscape
to enhance their production needs.
The two time periods of European occupancy relatively correlate with
two periods of sheep expansion. The first time period witnessed broad-
scale and large hectarage squatting with minimal fence delineation; the
second involved small, defined enclosures, and a more concentrated and
intensive regime around experimentation and specialisation in quality
sheep breeding.
Merino sheep were first landed at Portland in 1834 and remained the
predominant imported breed although Southdown’s, Cotswold’s, Border
Leicester’s, Lincoln’s, Romney Marsh’s, and the American ‘Vermont’
strain followed between 1841 and 1880s. British bred sheep were sought
because they were ‘not so dainty as to what they eat as the merinoes, they
yield a larger quantity of wool … and fetch higher prices when fattened
up for sale’. The Merino was purposely bred in Tasmania and on the
Macarthur Plains for Australian conditions, to achieve super fine long
wool to capture British markets. The results of selectively bred wool in
this time period produced the most sought after fleeces in English and
Scottish wool-halls particularly from stations including ‘Carngham’,
‘Carranballac’, ‘Larra’, ‘Wooriwyrite’, ‘Clyde’, and ‘Mount Noorat’.
Crossbreds and Comebacks resulted in the Polwarth flocks from Lincoln-
Merino cross ewes and Merino rams, and Corriedale’s originated from
Lincoln ewes and Merino rams and successive progeny inbreeding. It was
also a time (1860s–1870s) when Shorthorn [Durham] breeding for beef
and dairy cattle was highly fashionable.
The two time periods witnessed a new human cyclical relationship.
The landscape became subservient to the seasonal rituals of lambing,
shearing, crutching, and pasture rotation of sheep.
The District’s native grassland and soil, originally dominated by the
Summer growing and deep-rooted perennial Kangaroo Grass with associ-
ated Wallaby and Spear Grasses, were only accustomed to light and inter-
mittent non-hoofed marsupial browsing activities. Heavier and
continuous grazing by hoofed mammals stressed tussock densities, and
suppressed seedling regeneration, creating bare habitats suitable for other
native shorter Winter growing or exotic grasses. In this chain, defoliation
of trees to promote grass and herbage, soil compaction and decreased
porosity caused by trampling, high soil nitrate levels from concentrated
manuring in sheep folds and walks, and prevention of frequent burning
regimes, were factors that collectively contributed to the decline of this
ecosystem. Introduced pasture species—notably Subterranean Clover—
and the deliberate application of fertilisers that suppressed short Stipa
and Danthonia species completed this near extinction after 1900, while
at the same time raising sheep and cattle carrying capacities.
332 D. S. Jones
Linked to these changes were the spread of infrastructure, diseases and

poisons, exotic vegetation, erosion, faunal competitor and predator dis-
placement, and a failure to replenish the earth’s fertility. Societal struc-
tures and objectives on the plains focused upon the single need to shelter,
shade, water, wash, fence, manipulate, and feed sheep, and to maintain
quality pastures for their browsing. Pleuropneumonia, scab, respiratory
‘catarrh’, ‘staggers’ (or Nasal Bot), liver fluke, and foot-rot diseases,
imported from Europe, provoked increased drainage works and chemical
applications to protect sheep, while chemical substances laid, especially
strychnine and cyanide, poisoned native mammals and avifauna. Exotic
vegetation seeds were transferred in sheep dung, hoofs, and fleece, spread-
ing introduced pasture species, exotic weeds and shrubs, as well as native
species; the aftermath of fires and wets permitted prolific native and
exotic seed germination on roadsides, railroad reserves, and stock routes.
Soil compaction by hoofs promoted erosion and surface runoff due to
lowered porosity levels. At ‘Wando Vale’ in 1853,
herbaceous plants and grasses give way for the silk grass and the little annuals
[which] … die in our deep clay soil with a few hot days in spring, and nothing
returns to supply their place until later in winter following. The consequence is
that the long deep-rooted grasses that held our strong clay hill together have died
out; the ground is now exposed to the sun, and it has cracked in all directions;
also the sides of precipitous creeks—long slips, taking trees and all with them.
When I first came here [in 1840], I knew of but two landslips … now there
are hundreds.
Competitors to grass pastures and predators of sheep were shot,

trapped, or poisoned, oblivious to any function that they served in plague,
predator, and or pest control. Because trees provided roosts, shelter or
observation perches, ‘contributed to foot-rot’, or were considered ancil-
lary to the threat, colonials often burnt, ringbarked, or removed them.
Earth fertility diminished as the cyclical decomposition nourishment sys-
tem was not ensured, although the natural phosphorus deficiency in
District soils was recognised. Heavy and damaging concentrations of
dung around folds replaced nutrients but wool and carcasses, for tallow
and lamb, were transported to Yorkshire and Melbourne, resulting in

minimal chemical transference to soils.
* * *
In the prophetically named clipper ‘Lightning’ a batch of 24 English

Grey Rabbits were shipped to Melbourne, and some of their progeny to
‘Barwon Park’, in 1859.
Barwon Park was renowned for its Rabbits. It is recorded that 12,608 were
killed there in 1865, and 11,277 from January to August in 1866. They were
the product of 12 does and 6 bucks liberated seven years earlier—18,000
Rabbits from one doe! They were killed within a mile of the place where they
were first liberated.
The rabbit, from 1865 onwards, became a symbolic and a hated spec-
tre on the Australian landscape. By 1870, it had spread extensively
throughout the District: to the grazier, it was a pest, to the selector a
financial nightmare, yet to the poor, it was a cheap meal. The implica-
tions of its invasion upon the landscape were readily grasped but actions
to control it were hampered by fencing forms, rabbiting stratagems, and
a prevalent public anti-science attitude. By 1890, they ‘were scudding
across the hills like flocks of sheep’. Success at rabbit control was only
achieved in the 1950s.
Rabbits proved adept colonisers by changing their dietary regimes to
feast on native and exotic grass shoots and tree seedlings and to strip bark
from young saplings. Because sheep specialisation was important in this
time period, the competing close browsing by rabbits left its mark by
placing a ceiling upon and often reducing sheep carrying capacities to the
detriment of the grazier. The selector, however, was threatened with crop
loss—his main source of income. Ironically, rabbit meat provided a cheap
and palatable alternative to lamb or beef for poorer residents of the
District, if not the shillings gained from skin and carcass sales. A compel-
ling legal principle also evolved, of ‘landholder onus’: the freeholder or
leaseholder was responsible for rabbit destruction; a principle enshrined
in subsequent rabbit and noxious weed control legislation in Victoria.
334 D. S. Jones
The consequence of these factors was expensive outlays on fencing, stone

walls, and shooters at stations such as ‘Wando Vale’, ‘Wooriwyrite’,
‘Purrumbete’, ‘Barwon Park’, ‘Mount Noorat’, ‘Borongarook’, and ‘The
Hill’, and the laying of baits laced with strychnine, bisulphide of carbon,
or phosphorated grain. Rabbit hunts, also, became an extension of the
‘English’ sporting pursuit for graziers and colonial visitors. Although
fencing and walling was not effective, property or paddock encirclement
by such devices, with netting, was an important strategy. Enclosure fol-
lowed by baiting, and destruction of warrens and burrows, assisted the
process. Shooting and trapping proved cheaper and easier due to scalp
bonuses or bounties, but there were problems.
The sport of the hunt and ‘superstitious horror’ of ‘Egyptian plagues’
prevented a scientific purge of the species in the District. It was only in
the 1950s that myxomatosis was spread, and later the tasteless 1080
(sodium fluoro acetate).
* * *
In considering loss of fauna and avifauna four factors are evident. These
include the role of direct killing, habitat modification or destruction,
introduced species impacts, and the sharp destabilisation of traditional
human-animal relationships. Of these, habitat loss was the most influen-
tial as it directly impinged upon nesting, food, shelter and breeding
requirements of fauna and avifauna, so it is valuable to summarise these
habitat changes before considering impacts upon actual species.
There are four habitats in the District and each has experienced varied
modifications. Animal communities tend to correlate with these homo-
geneous habitats, although some animals and plants are widespread
throughout the District.
In the Manna and River Red Gum dominated grassy open woodlands,
on both the volcanic plains and the stony rises, extinction correlates with
clearing. This woodland habitat was clearly very extensive before 1830,
fragmentary on the plains but denser on the stony rises. Aboriginals min-
imised tree removal through fire-stick farming, colonials extensively cut
timber for housing, shelter, fencing, firewood and to assist cropping and
grazing, but loss of woodlands was more pronounced in this time period.
The reasons lie in the wave of ringbarking and wholesale clearances to

open up land and permit denser agricultural pursuits. In the latter time
period, probably 60% of the woodland extant in 1800 was felled in con-
trast to semi-selective use or firing in the first two time periods.
Destruction resulted in loss of River Red and Manna Gums, nectar and
pollen sources for animals, food sources for Koalas, shelter and hollows
for refuge and breeding, seeds and foliage litter to assist nesting, and the
removal of the grassy stratum forage and grazing cover for large macro-
pods and ground-dwelling animals. Destruction of food and cover habi-
tats, elimination of the fire regime, and increased competition assisted
the decline of animal species in this habitat.
Habitat loss was more pronounced in the Kangaroo and Wallaby Grass
dominated savannah and perennial tussock grassland. Over 90% of this
habitat moved from supporting a wide range of animals in 1800, to sup-
porting only one, sheep, by 1900. Introduced species, loss of fire regime,
soil compaction, clearance of subsidiary River Red Gums, and extensive
earthworks all assisted in this process. The eradication of indigenous pas-
ture grasses, however, was achieved in the 1920s–1940s with the intro-
duction of super-phosphate, specialised annual grasses, and technologically
advanced ploughing approaches. Macropod forage species declined, shel-
ters and hollows in dispersed trees were removed, and increased forage
and hunting competition by foxes, rabbits, Brown Hares, sheep, cattle,
and quolls was paralleled by wholesale direct killing techniques (shoot-
ing, poisoning, trapping, and hunting) by colonials. What was an equi-
librium in the first time period was destroyed in the second time period
and replaced by an advanced mono-cultural regime in the third
time period.
The predominantly River Red Gum riparian edges, herb dominated
freshwater meadows and marshes, and semi-permanent saline salt pans
and meadows were the least impacted habitats. While many riparian
edges remained, by 1900 over 50% were modified or destroyed. Some
30% of the shallow and deep freshwater marshes and meadows had been
drained, and numerous saline wetlands also drained, but a considerable
number of impoundments, dams, and springs had been constructed to
increase water retention capacities in the District. While the latter were
beneficial for avifauna, fish, and amphibians, it was the loss of edge
336 D. S. Jones
vegetation that provided shelter, hollows, and breeding nests for these
animals as well as for mammals and reptiles, that was more detrimental.
Water bodies within rivers, streams, fresh and saline lakes, were also
modified although the degree of disturbance cannot be assessed. While
Aboriginals impeded water flows through their fish traps, colonials con-
structed impoundments, de-snagged watercourses, diverted water flows,
drained water bodies, increased saline and saltation levels, and thereby
decreased eutrophication processes. The degree of impact upon fish, eels,
riparian and aquatic vegetation, and zooplankton is conjecture, but cer-
tainly stocking of waters with introduced fish species would have aided
modifications.
The impact of these habitat changes on avifauna is difficult to assess,
and the degree of impact, other than measuring habitat loss, is conjec-
ture. Long-billed Corellas, previously dependent upon Murnong, shifted
to Onion Grass as their primary staple but found competition with rab-
bits for summer cereal grains and Onion Grass corms. For other fauna,
the collective spread of scattered woodland remnants on rail and road
reserves, uncleared farmland, watercourse edges and in plantations, may
not be ecologically viable but they still provided shelter, roosts, protec-
tion, and nesting sites for permanent and migratory species. Seasonal and
numerical changes in species, influenced by climate, wetlands availability,
dietary insects and nectar availability, and duck shootings, would also
have affected these patterns.
Freshwater wetland-reliant species and species that use this habitat
specifically for breeding would have been most affected. Species reliant
upon conditions such as fish availability, freshwater meadows, shallow
freshwater marshes, deep freshwater marshes, permanent saline wet-
lands, presence of Cane Grass, Lignum spp., or reeds, salinity less than
60 ppt, greater than 60 ppt or hypersaline lakes, benthic organisms,
pollen and nectar, small aquatic animals, submerged plants and mol-
luscs, would have been constrained by loss of these habitats. Of these,
the Plains Wanderer and Brolga were originally prolific in the grass-
lands and wetlands but are now rare, and ‘the extensive changes to this
lake region since colonial settlement have reduced most of the water-
bird populations’.
The impact upon mammals is easier to assess given prolific historical

recordings, recent sub-fossil excavations, and a shorter list of species. It is
harder to assess the impact on reptiles and amphibians. Mammal species
suffered the most from direct and indirect killing, habitat alteration, and
introduced faunal competition. Dingoes, Eastern Quoll and Tiger Quolls,
Eastern Grey Kangaroos, and Red-necked Wallabies were widely shot or
poisoned by strychnine and baits by colonials because of their browsing
in sheep pastures, or ‘sporting’ qualities. Woodland ringbarking, burning
and clearing destroyed the arboreal habitats of Sugar and Feathertail
Gliders, Tuans, Rabbit-eared Tree-rats, Ringtail Possums and Koalas, and
heavy browsing of terrestrial habitats affected Eastern Barred Bandicoots,
Red-necked Wallabies, and Echidnas. Draining and ploughing of wet-
lands and riparian edges severely modified Swamp Rat, Platypus, and
Water-rat habitats, and Wombats were shot or poisoned as they caused
damage to fences.
Foxes, Wild Dogs, and Cats found new prey in small mammals,
particularly the Quolls, Brush-tailed Phascogales, and Eastern Barred
Bandicoots. Heavy grazing by sheep and rabbits, and clearing, reduced
ground cover, shelter and food for the Fat-tailed Dunnarts and Eastern
Barred Bandicoots, and soil compaction reduced arthropod availabil-
ity for bandicoots. Prevention of regular fire regimes also reduced
herbage food sources for all mammals and stifled vegetation regenera-
tion and flowering. Epidemics may also have assisted Koala and Quoll
decimation, as also fur hunting of Koalas and Water-rats. As a conse-
quence, species, including Tiger Quolls, Red-bellied Pademelons,
Brush-tailed Bettongs, Eastern Hare, Bridled Nailtail, Toolache, and
Swamp Wallabies, Rabbit-eared Tree-rats and Dingoes by 1900 had
disappeared due to either colonial actions or introduced predators. By
1900, Eastern Grey Kangaroos, Tuans, Eastern Quolls, Red-necked
Wallabies, Echidnas, Water-rats, Koalas and Wombats were also at risk
of severe decline or extinction.
The many swamps and depressions that were drained, and lengths of
the creek and river ‘improvement’ works undertaken, in both time peri-
ods, would have disrupted the habitats of fish and water-loving reptiles
and amphibians but the degree of impact is difficult to assess. Introduced
fish added to insect and zooplankton competition, and increased water
338 D. S. Jones
turbidity and siltation, while de-snagging and impoundments affected

migration and breeding. Of these, probably the Dwarf Galaxias and
Short-finned Eels have been most affected and reduced in numbers.
* * *
While there were substantial losses of faunal and avian species between
1800 and 1900, some indigenous species adapted and thrived in both
time periods, and some introduced species became dominant in the ani-
mal biota of the District. Chief among the latter were sheep, horses, cat-
tle, and rabbits.
Native species that benefitted from landscape changes in both time
periods are limited. Only the Brush-tailed Possum adapted well to habi-
tat changes and may have increased in population since colonial settle-
ment, moving to Sugar, River Red, and Manna Gum plantations and
roadside reserves—a favourite habitat for bats—as well as the roofs of
structures and houses. Eastern Grey Kangaroo populations escalated in
the two time periods, from the lack of regular Aboriginal and dingo hunt-
ing, but severe hunting and culling practices by the colonials in this time
period drastically reduced its numbers.
A number of birds revelled in the new open pastures and endowment of
seeds. A small flock of a hundred Galahs, Long-billed Corellas, or Sulphur-
crested Cockatoos ‘might remove 10 to 14 hundredweight of seed a year;
a flock of 5,000 birds might consume 25 to 30 tons of seed a year’.
Similarly, Jacky Winters, White-fronted Chats, Yellow-rumped Thornbills,
Richard’s Pipits, White-backed Magpies, Australian Magpie-larks, and
some native Quails enjoyed the newly up-ploughed bulbous roots, pasture
seeds and insects, aquatic loving invertebrates in farm dams and impound-
ments, foraging in tussocky grasslands, wet grasslands, pastures, or shallow
waters around dam edges. They also found new roosts, usually in River
Red or Manna Gum hollows along streams, on poles, in homestead and
ancillary structure roofs, or in tussock depressions. Frogs were also benefi-
ciaries of the expansion of farm dams and water impoundments.
In contrast, it was many of the introduced mammals, avifauna, and
fish, by deliberate acclimatisation efforts, that thrived in the District’s
environment. Song birds were acclimated to counter the perceived
‘savage silence’ of the landscape and to recapture the bird life and sounds
of English and Scottish ‘home’ pastures. Common Blackbirds, Song
Thrushes, Common Starlings, European Goldfinches, European
Greenfinches, Domestic Pigeons, and the ‘most destructive’ House
Sparrows, were introduced by early colonials (mainly during 1861–1865)
and they readily spread into pastures, and roosted around homesteads
and in townships. Skylarks, Tree Sparrows, Linnets, and the ‘indefatiga-
ble grub and grasshopper destroyers’, Indian Minahs, were also released
but were less successful in acclimatising. Game birds to cater for shooting
pleasure, such as Pheasants, Partridges, Californian Quail, and Grouse,
were introduced but suffered by eating poisoned baits and strychnine laid
for rabbits, or from the depredations of Quolls and Foxes. Many of these
species were released in Geelong and Ballarat and at ‘Ercildoune’, Tower
Hill, and ‘Barwon Park’.
‘Ercildoune’ also provided important hatching and breeding ponds for
fish. Brown and Salmon Trout were dietary favourites. The former was
successfully released into Mt Emu and Merri Creeks, Hopkins River and
Lakes Purrumbete and Bullenmerri in the late 1860s–1870s. Redfin and
Rainbow Trout also thrived in freshwater lakes and some watercourses;
Mosquito Fish, Goldfish, Crucian Carp, and Tench escaped or were
introduced, the latter two in Lake Colac.
Brown Hares and Foxes readily acclimatised in the 1860s. Hares readily
adopted the new grasses, and Foxes found new prey in small native mam-
mals, such as the Eastern Barred Bandicoot, despite the ravages of Quolls,
Eagles, Hawks, and Falcons. Hares also ‘did not become well established
until after the initial plague of rabbits had decreased in the early 1900s‘.
Red Deer was introduced at ‘Carngham’, ‘Ercildoune’, ‘Langi Willi’, and
‘Longerenong’, with the latter comprising the base stock in Gariwerd.
Feral dogs and cats thrived around settlement precincts upon small native
mammals, including Eastern Barred Bandicoots, and House Mice that
lived ‘around and within houses, sheds and haystacks, as well as in open
paddocks‘, or competed with Quolls for food resources.
* * *
340 D. S. Jones
6.7 ‘Rust on the Iron’

The literature of our land is … a historical record of the development of its
nationhood. The pioneer found himself face to face with Nature looming stern,
inscrutable, seemingly niggardly. Desert, Drought, Fire, Flood oppressed him,
oftentimes to the verge of despair. Living, of necessity, a lonely life in thinly-
peopled tracts, the morbid habit of introspection took him in its grasp. His life,
spent in seeming conflict with the seemingly unconquerable, in long patient
endurance and unending labour, was to him a dumb struggle hopeless from the
beginning. The Bush-spirit was a demon.
M.P. Hansen & D. McLachlan, An Austral Garden: An Anthology of
Australian Verse, 1912
* * *
The locus classicus of the colonial attitude to the landscape during this
time period was invented in Marcus Clarke’s ‘Preface’ to Sea Spray and
Smoke Drift (1876). A seductive treatise of rhetoric, reconstructed from
his critiques on Photographs of the Pictures in the National Gallery,
Melbourne (1874), it purportedly voiced literary feelings and perceptions
felt in the period, expressing ‘the dominant note of Australian scenery’.
The romanticism in the ‘purple passage’, however, was belated to devel-
opments in painting, gardening, and architecture that were already
exploring the en plein air tradition in Golden Summers, a ‘natural’ design
style, and provincial architecture through Gothicism. The ‘oppression’ of
the landscape became naught to the children of ‘Sere woodlands and sad
wildernesses’: wide horizons, ‘sublimity’ of natural light, and intimacy
with its patterns permitted them to ‘enter into the view’ of the landscape.
Figures 6.7 and 6.8 depict the painting locations and places mentioned
in this section.
This section examines the changes in the landscape imagery in this
time period through artistic and literary canvases, and the use of vocabu-
laries, in expressing this ‘dominant note’ about the tangible and sensory
character of this landscape.
* * *
Fig. 6.7 Paintings and places in the landscape

341
342
D. S. Jones

The ‘squatter sorcerer’ cast a wand across the plains in this time period
imposing ‘all the hostile emblems of agricultural settlement’. This time
period witnessed an acceptance of the fulfilment of this vision through its
expression in structures of bluestone, and canvases of emerald green and
azure blue, that recast its earthy riches. A shadow of ‘weird melancholia’
however, overhung the comprehension of the landscape as it held a strong
position in translating the moods and rhythms of the landscape. Literary
expressions of ‘melancholy’, ‘grotesqueness’, and the ‘haunting solitude of
silence’, used by visitors or city-based travellers, were replaced by an inti-
macy that permitted the noun ‘weirdness’ to be attached to ‘melancholy’.
Long-standing residents and artists of this landscape had advanced
further and sought a kinship with the place to better detail its qualities
and cater for its moods.
To the attuned resident, the landscape told of deeper patterns and held
out refreshing tints to ‘clear eyes’. ‘Corrugated iron-roofing glistening in
the light’ was symptomatic of the spread of structures cloaked in sharp
sheens and deep, mysterious, dark blue, carved from the bowels of the
plains. Silver tussocks, tinted with yellow-greens, waved on the plains;
their forlorn reddened cousins sought refuge in unploughed reserves.
Summer mists floated on hills, spreading lays of peace, while descriptive
metaphors, colours, and ecological details in colonial literature and art
moved to open their eyes to the sensory qualities of the plains. Such an
insight read the skies and gum trees more objectively, capturing the poetics of
the ‘skyline’s blue burnish’d resistance’.
Quickened by emotion … [they were] left to descry the colours in the apparent
colourlessness … the upturned earth that showed red, white, puce, gamboge; the
blue in the grey of the new leafage; the geranium red of young scrub; the purple-
blue depths of the shadows. To know, too, … a rank nostalgia for the scent of
the aromatic foliage; for the honey fragrance of the wattle; the perfume that rises
hot and heavy as steam from vast paddocks of sweet, flowering lucerne—even
for the sting and tang of countless miles of bush ablaze.
One recognised the hidden scents of wattles and enjoyed the witchery
in impetuous mocking cries of native birds. Gloomy adjectives lost their
questioning power, one sat back,
344 D. S. Jones
too lazy to speak, almost to think. The beautiful flower-garden which lay before
us … looked rather brown and sere, after the hot winds, although the orange-
trees were still green enough, and vast cluster of purple grapes were ripening
rapidly among the yellowing vine-leaves.
* * *
In 1867 a Swiss-born painter Abram-Louis Buvelôt travelled across the

District to the pastures of the Wannon. Spending several weeks camping
out, he became captivated by the trees, the waterpools, their shadows,
and the tonality of light values. Waterpool at Coleraine (Sunset) (1869)
became a provocative statement of his insight: ‘I loved it, and for three
weeks I went to the same tree every day and learned it’. Similar perceptive
visions pervaded the arts of painting, gardening, and architecture in this
time period. A vision marked by reading and intuitive understanding,
than constrained by ‘weirdness’ or ‘grotesqueness’, in all that one surveyed.
Louis Buvelôt’s Waterpool was one of a series at the same pools that first
broke with the image of a vast ‘wilderness’ engendered in ‘weird melan-
cholic’ associations, by portraying a landscape ‘amenable to settlement
and rewarding to the human endeavor’. Second, he captured the tonal
appearance of light in the landscape discovering the bushland’s yellow-
grey tints, the luminescence in the sky, and the ‘jades and olives of its
verdure’. The viewer pushed aside the swards of tussocks, or the fronds of
bracken, to ‘enter into the view’. But in all its poetic serenity, reminiscent
of Corot, the Waterpool, and successive paintings, still retained the soft
feathery contours of foliage so familiar in European trees. In Waterpool,
Buvelôt selected a subject which at once touched that sense of the poetic
that dwells in awakened memories and suggests contrasts of the past with
the present. The setting:
It is a hot summer evening, and the sun sinking in an unclouded splendour of

pure light more dazzling than the crimson glories of a heavier sky, glows already
on the rim of the rising pasture land. His beams thus flung over the landscape
fill the air with golden splendour, and bathe every tree and herb in soft and
vaporous warmth … A waterpool in the foreground reflects the deeper tints of
the upper sky, and from either bank rise into intermingling bewilderment of
branches, the reft and splintered trunks of two ancient gum trees … But all the
accessories of the scene are subordinated to the prevailing sense of quiet. All is
hot, silent, still, and dreamy … The air is heavy with the intense hush of the
last instant of a dying Australian summer’s day, and the old gum trees stand
alone with motionless branches and folded leaves beside the solitary pool.
Atmospheres dominated Waterpool at Coleraine (1869); a pictorial

expression distinguished by its forms, hues, tonality, and a sense of inti-
macy in contrast to more formal compositional aspects. Coleraine and a
Waterpool (1871) was a smaller image and ‘cut off from view’ the upper
foliage to express this informality. Bush Creek, Coleraine (1874) induced
the light bright yellow-grey tints of the open bushland scenery, but
depicted ‘the eroded creek bed … the delicate touches of blue in the
creek’s remaining water’, the bed’s pale ochres, and the ‘open’ ground of
yellow-grey tussocks. Further up the valley, the Upper Falls of the Wannon
(c.1874) caught the ‘music of waters in the midst of the profound soli-
tude of an Australian wild’ inducing a melancholic literary response from
a reviewer: ‘He [Buvelôt] seems to be imbued with the spirit of Australian
scenery, and reproduces in his pictures all the weird romance and strange
old-time mystery which seems to live in our Australian forest’.
The imputation of ‘weirdness’, ‘melancholy’, and so on entranced liter-
ary and art critics in the 1860s and 1870s, inhibiting their recognition of
the new quality of en plein air—light values—that determined the
appearance of Buvelôt’s paintings. In 1868, Buvelôt returned to the
District, staying at ‘Terrinallum’, and sketched the station and surround-
ing properties. Terrinallum Station (1869) was a typical ‘homestead por-
trait’ of the time period depicting the characteristic facets of country life.
The pasture,
the emerald green is laid on to an extent calculated to drive any drought-

persecuted squatter, who pauses to gaze upon it, mad with envy, hatred, malice,
and every possible kind of uncharitableness.
While emerald grasses may have been exaggerated, the breadth of the
horizon’s skies and vegetation were perceptively descried, as also in Mount
Fyans Homestead (1869). A freehand trait in Mount Fyans (1872) caught
bending, wind-blown trees, echoing the direction of streaming
346 D. S. Jones
storm-clouds, expressing ‘the impulse of the driving wind’. Grey-green

grasslands highlighted with creamy yellows—the ‘greyness and transper-
ency [sic]’—also appeared in the large Mount Fyans Woolshed (1869)
where the ‘artist’s freedom of selection’ rewarded ‘a truth to nature which
cannot be denied’. It was, however, the ‘tone of these pictures … [which
made him] unequalled’. One early reviewer recognised this tonality:
One conspicuous merit of M. Buvelôt’s oil paintings and watercolours is their

atmospheres. Whether he shows us a scene flooded with the light of summer
noon, or in the grey of the morning, or in the glow of the evening, you are con-
scious of the presence of the luminous medium—the delicate and impalpable
veil is thrown over every object … all is softened and harmonized but the subtle
circum-ambience.
The ‘subtle circum-ambience’ was absent in the ‘literal interpretation,

idiomatic but mannered’ approach of von Guérard, the ‘agreeable para-
phrase’ of Chevalier, or in Gully’s ‘poetic version’—his lithographs. It was
the visually appreciative approach to the landscape, the recognition of
colour tints, and the tonality of light values imbuing Buvelôt’s images
that ‘redeem[ed] the Australian Arcadia from the approbrium heaped
upon it by early travelers’. This approach matured later in the Heidelberg
School on canvases such as Lost (1886), Golden Summer, Eaglemont
(1889), Still Glides the Stream, and Shall for Ever Glide (1890), or Down
on His Luck (1889).
If light qualities were embraced in art, ‘picturesque’ was shrugged off
in garden designs and replaced by a ‘naturalist’ or Gardenesque style that
opened up vistas, and encouraged horticultural diversity within tight
visual frames. The spirit of the nineteenth-century country estate ‘parkes’,
advocated by Thomas Shepherd’s Lectures on Landscape Gardening in
Australia (1836), and explored at ‘Murndal’ and ‘Mount Noorat’, was
abandoned in favour of designs that protected the homestead but used
natural surroundings. This is not to say that utilitarian designs based
upon geometry (‘The Gums’), homestead kitchen gardens (‘Woolongoon’,
‘Talindert’, ‘Mount William’, ‘Barunah Plains’), conservatories (‘Barunah
Plains’, ‘Marida Yallock’, ‘Renny Hill’, ‘Trawalla’), ferneries (‘Belmont’),
ha-ha walls (‘Mount Noorat’, ‘Dalvui’, ‘Glenormiston’, ‘Mawallok), or
box-hedged parterres (‘The Laurels’, ‘Willaroo’, ‘Titanga’, ‘Rosemount’)

were not functionally significant, but they remained as garnishes in a
grander vision. Parklands, at ‘Meningoort’, ‘Narrapumelap’, ‘Titanga’,
‘Talindert’, ‘Gringegalgona’, ‘Murndal’, and ‘Mount Noorat’, are testa-
ment to this Gardenesque vision.
The homestead garden, as well as township botanic gardens, became
symbols of the Gardenesque tradition that warranted a designer to coor-
dinate and articulate the vision. William Guilfoyle was the most promi-
nent in this agenda. This stratagem moved from a veritable garden plate
of bush tuberous shoots and roots in the first time period, from a utilitar-
ian mode of survival sustenance in the second time period, to one of set-
ting, protection, and enjoyment in this time period. Under this agenda
Shepherd’s principles were resurrected and entwined with the ideals of
William Kent and J.C. Loudon. Examples at ‘Mawallok’, ‘Meningoort’,
‘Merrang’, and ‘Titanga’ typify this revival by linking the criteria of
weather protection and enhancement of the natural surroundings in
designs. An extension of these criteria was the seeding of native planta-
tions that led out into the plains, and enclosed pastures, on ‘Larra’,
‘Titanga’, ‘Carranballac’, ‘Banongill’, ‘Baangil’, and ‘Purrumbete’.
Homestead gardens in the ‘natural’ style became symptomatic of many
stations throughout the District as increased income and freedom from
the toil of stock management occurred. These ideological instruments of
social improvement worked as kindly and civilising influences on all who
experienced and descried them, and the advocacy was there to instil it:
We would, therefore, seriously advise the settler here who has the welfare of the colony
at heart, as well as the health and prosperity of himself and dependents, to set out at
once to work … and plant the scrubby lands (particularly well adapted for European
and American trees), and the sunny and shaded slopes, valleys, river margins, moun-
tain tops, spreading plains, sandy wastes and golden gullies, with trees and shrubs,
which grow and flourish while men sleep, adding wealth and beauty to a country
already rich in precious metals and foreign luxuries of every description, but poor
indeed in that spirit and enterprise which has made other countries great—viz. the
giving the mass of people a vested interest in the soil they tread, encouraging them to
improve it, and bring forth the wealth and blessings of which it is capable, when
aided by their united labour, which would in a short time not only make Victoria a
self-supporting colony, but go far towards checking the migratory and unsettled char-
348 D. S. Jones
acter of its inhabitants, by inducing them to dot the country with homesteads of their
own, as well as improving their condition both morally and socially.
The Gardenesque style ‘of imitating nature’ required that in ‘planting,

thinning and pruning, in order to produce Gardenesque effect, the beauty
of every individual tree, and shrub as a single object, is to be taken into
consideration’. The eucalypt was reassessed as an object of beauty. ‘I pity
him who cannot admire the stately red-gum trees, … with their magnifi-
cent trunks and gnarled and spreading branches’. Native species however
were not adopted out of any semblance of conscious loyalty. Rather they
were used as useful species to complement flowering and artistically meri-
torious specimens in gardens. Strategic planting, ‘to provide an uninter-
rupted view of the park and pleasure grounds’, the siting of a homestead
‘near the centre of the valley where good water may be found’, and a ‘very
large lake’ were all considerations that could achieve this realm.
While nature imitation and recognition of light qualities were changes
in organic and oil palettes, the homestead itself was advanced into an
English manor. Wrapped in ubiquitous bluestone and Gothic style it
spoke of the character of the District. Tradition and restraint were laid
aside by graziers, and Gothic revival with esoteric French medieval and
Classical influences, were expressed in homestead, ‘village’ church, wool-
shed, gatehouse, and even down to the lowly water trough. Bluestone
provided unity and ironically resembled the colour and composition of
the Scottish Lowlands vernacular buildings constructed of ‘whin stone’.
The building ‘mania’ of this time period infected the lives of graziers.
They sought to emulate their English, Scottish, and Irish counterparts
with ‘manors’ of equal luxury, having already acquired comparable if not
larger estates. A grazier remarked:
I look upon it as the crowning folly of my life. I was swept into building it as
the strong man is drawn into the stream he cannot resist. I regard it as a burden
that may encumber my son’s life.
The ‘folly’ was a two-storey Italianate homestead for ‘Mount Noorat’.

Other follies included the classical two-storey utilitarian ‘Barwon Park’,
homesteads at ‘Titanga’ and ‘Larra’, the Scots Border County style stables
at ‘Larra’, or the lavish ‘Narrapumelap’ complete with 21 m bluestone tower.
The trend was to emulate and to assert wealth and position over the
landscape, by homestead and garden. While jealousy was one motive,
others were romanticism with personal heritage, the desire to entertain
visitors in style, ‘homestead creation’ itself, visual manifestations of the
dominance of Presbyterianism in the District, or a long term vision of
position, as evidenced at ‘Chatsworth’, ‘Mount Noorat’ and ‘Ercildoune’.
Trollope observed in Australia and New Zealand (1873):
As were country houses and country life then in England, plentiful, proud,
prejudiced, given to hospitality, impatient of contradiction, not highly lettered,
healthy, industrious, careful of the main chance, thoughtful of the future, and
above all, conscious—perhaps a little too conscious—of their own importance,
so now is the house and so is the life of the country gentleman in Australia.
A popular architect, and proponent of the Gothic style, also remarked:
The general belief is that the next generation of squatters, or rather the sons of the
present squatters will be very much more liberal minded than their fathers, as the
great majority of them have been poor men and so haven’t received the best education.
So of course if their families are well educated their tastes will demean something
‘nobby’ (excuse slang) and then there will be more hope for architects.
In construction, the use of bluestone, with slate tiles or corrugated iron

as a roofing material, was highly influential. Locally quarried, cut, and
chipped, the stone was the binding texture and colour of most verandah
enclosed homesteads.
* * *
Marcus Clarke’s ‘weird melancholy’ epitaph waxed lyrically with his

interpretation of Waterpool at Coleraine (1869). It was an imaginary
vision born from English education, knowledge, and tradition, yet he did
encapsulate what was distinctive in contrast to what was commonplace
and familiar in the landscape. But, ‘only the work of artists, looking
around with fresh eyes, could lift this imaginary burden … And it was
350 D. S. Jones
the painters who first saw the Australian landscape as it really was’. While
artists did read the landscape with clearer eyes, only some writers and
graziers were more attuned and possessed the agility to put sensory images
on paper. The difficulty was the act of reading, untinted by European
notions, irrespective of being a writer, painter, or designer.
Inherent in the epitaph is an Australia versus Europe landscape com-
parison, and the drawing of value judgements about fauna, flora, and
seasons, compared to those familiar on English shores. These values often
tinted an ability to read the distinctive and inherent beauty in the land-
scape. Lines in Geoffry Hamlyn (1859) tested this insensitivity and por-
trayed a new clarity of perception and intensity of feeling. Clarke
advanced this insight further in ‘purple ink’ adding a flavour to the rec-
ognised aspect of melancholy—the adjective ‘weird’. The pronounce-
ment confirmed an awakening attitude of the emotional significance of
the landscape: ‘his version of Australia is a fantasy in which the normal
order of things is reversed’. Contrasting conflict and romantic associa-
tions were the order, an ambivalence to repelling and attracting symbols
the means, and an attempt to awaken a consciousness in ‘that wild dream-
land called the Bush’ was the objective.
Such an expression of love appears poignantly in Richard Mahony’s
(1929) eyes in Ultima Thule (c.1878–1880) where:
Now, fresh from foreign travel, from a wider knowledge of the beauties of the
old world, he felt doubly alien; and, with his eyes still full of greenery and lush-
ness, he could see less beauty than ever in its dun and arid landscape.
Instead ‘sunlight and space’, ‘inimitable blue distances and gentian-

blue skies’, ‘long red roads, running inflexible as ruled lines towards a
steadily receding horizon’ became the inherent qualities.
The words and ‘eyes [,] still full of greenery’, are those of a foreign
traveller who, typically, compared his home landscape to that over which
he travelled. ‘Twain’ noted ‘the strange scribblings of Nature’ when he
observed the ‘forests of great melancholy gum trees, with trunks ragged
with curled sheets of flaking bark’, Following the Equator (1897). The
decisive notion however was the gloomy and depressive atmosphere
evoked by the ‘melancholy’ and the inanimate image of ‘erysipelas
convalescents’. To Gordon, they were the
gnarl’d, knotted trunks Eucalyptian

Seem carved, like weird columns Egyptian
With curious device—quaint inscription,
And hieroglyph strange.
To Geoffry Hamlyn, these gums beheld scenes of ‘black burnt stems of

the stringy-bark … agreeably relieved by the white stems of the red and
blue gums’. Colour, familiarity, and ‘the merry laugh[s] … ringing’ aloft
in ‘the fragile boughs’ shed an awareness of the light, species, and beauty
within and without. It was not until late in this time period that the liter-
ary landscape escaped from a melancholy relationship to pioneering
hardship and struggle—the dark side of the Australian landscape—and
discovered the established insights of artists far from the ‘approbrium
heaped upon it by early travelers’.
* * *
A sense of the future, and a belongingness to the landscape, shaped the

time period. ‘I love a country life and it is a great sacrifice for me to forego
it at some seasons particularly the spring’, wrote one grazier recognising
the adoption of this landscape in his blood. Longingness to home was
generated in manifestations of solitude and lack of familiarity. Once
accustomed, the quality of the atmosphere, life, and landscape breath
became dominant in thoughts.
The ‘grand tour’ of England was popular in this time period but the
presumption was always that the traveller would return to the District’s
landscape. Perhaps the sense of establishment—a solid bluestone home,
a personal ‘parke’, the trappings of a lifestyle generated from investments
in the landscape—harboured security and brought familiarity with its
patterns, seasons, and horizons.
* * *
The landscape possessed a protean personality to the resident. By the end

of the time period, the romanticism imputed in ‘weirdness, melancholy,
etc.’, or the insignias of ‘sublimity’, was subordinated by a different
352 D. S. Jones
relationship with the landscape. The contradictions within, and not the
comparisons from without, underpinned thoughts. Elements within the
landscape were familiar, indelibly woven into the sense of colonial chil-
dren. The obsessive preoccupation of poetry and art in the second time
period, to comprehend and document the physical environment with all
its umbrageous, gnarl’d scenery under vivid blue skies, was disregarded by
a need to explore and encapsulate the qualities and tints of light, the
subtlety of its trees, and the deep personality in its meanings.
To the resident of the new landscape, the imagination of the mind,
inherent in descriptive picture-making, had found ‘clear Australian eyes’.
Permanence inspired new myths and stories to explain landscape potency
and presence, replacing those of long distant clans, where:
It was wholly alien to the constitution of the wild hunter and warriors who had
been wont to traverse pathless woods, to fish in the depths of sunless forest
streams, to chase the game of their native land through the lone untrampled
mead, or the hoar primeval forest.
One layer of ‘voices of the terrible deep’ was replaced by another layer
of dreams, visions, and myths underpinned by fragmented ‘old world’
traditions and mental structures. The ‘nooks and corners of our everyday
scenery’ were investigated, but the mystic and deep meanings remained
as only rumblings in the landscape’s bowels, dark shadows upon rippling
waters of holes, and curious natural features that questioned the spirit of
an alternate other resident within the landscape. The patina of rust fore-
shortened the longingness and marked a growing awareness to the land-
scape’s spirit.
* * *
6.8 Sunlit Afternoon Tapestry

These comprise, for Domains: landscape was subjected to increasing

fragmentation and spatial delineation by sale, selection, fencing, railway
easement, and political devolution; survey completion resulted in the
geometric partitioning and definition of landscape; land ownership was
expressed by possession of paper definitions that granted indefeasible title
and enabled easy transferability; a growing identification to the landscape
heightened communal bonds to a shared sense of destiny; vernacular
descriptive referents were readily adopted to aid explanations of places,
features, and objects in the landscape; and a successive layers of names
were laid across features and places in the landscape as myths, stories,
scientific information, and political structures evolved.
For Pathways, traits evident are: as modes of travel diversified a sense
of romanticism motivated attitudes to and interpretation of the land-
scape by travellers; journey routes, rail and road, were formally enclosed
into linear corridors, and embellished with bridges, culverts, signs, posts,
and travel-related service structures; and, railways became an influential
symbol of progress in the landscape.
For Gathering Places, traits evident are: homestead ‘villages’ lost their
traditionally dominant role in the landscape to townships, and became
more reclusive and seasonally active communities; townships acquired a
greater diversity of structure types and functions as their population and
position in the landscape increased; while most places of activity contin-
ued on their original sites, the numbers of homestead ‘villages’ and revered
gathering places across the landscape increased as disparities in township
size and frequency according to economic activities, and station fragmen-
tation, occurred; unusual natural features associated with perennial water
supplies gained more importance as regional nodes of public resort; and
the number of nostalgic markers, including cairns, memorials, and cem-
eteries, increased and became more formalised to accord with European
traditions.
For Shelter, traits evident are: this phase experienced a remarkable
building boom creating a regional unity and legacy in structure design,
form and texture; a Gothicism-Classicism stylistic language was explored
in church, homestead, woolshed, outbuilding, and bridge designs with
modifications to lighten building appearances and to soften impacts from
the harsh environment; structure siting sought to take advantage of
354 D. S. Jones
prominent or vantage points to enhance and symbolise colonial control

over the landscape; and creative architectural use of bluestone in the
design and detailing of structures sought to expose its inner qualities
and warmth.
For Plants, traits evident are: a growing emphasis on pasture and cereal
crop experimentation and specialisation resulted in a decline of native
grassland species; homestead site enrichment using both exotic and
Australasian species in Gardenesque styles was energetically undertaken
to satisfy aesthetic, horticultural and symbolic objectives; shelterbelt
plantings were commenced, primarily using native species, adopting lin-
ear lines of fences and boundaries as plantation corridors; felling of veg-
etation was concentrated on the forested edges of the plains, but extensive
swamp and stream drainage works were undertaken to expand pasture
and cereal cultivation opportunities; garden designs around homesteads
sought to use views, visual axes, microclimatic considerations, water bod-
ies, sheltered locations, and aesthetic notions to create distinctive sub-
regional garden types; while an open savannah exotic grassland devoid of
trees was being created by pastoral establishment the area of open savan-
nah woodlands was rapidly decreasing of which tree regeneration oppor-
tunities declined in both these ecosystems; and, the seeds of numerous
exotic noxious species were diffused throughout the landscape.
For Animals, traits evident are: the hunting ethos to native animals
continued in this phase but came to be directed more towards rabbits;
rabbits were introduced for game, and their adaptation to the landscape
and population explosion resulted in extensive pasture competition with
sheep and their designation as a pest; the sheep imperative was stronger
in this phase resulting in sheep being elevated to mythic status, and most
grazier activities sought to improve their pasturage and fleece through
breeding, flock specialisation, pasture improvement and enclosure, non-
pasture habitat destruction, and any means to reduce prey and competi-
tion for pastures; native fauna populations declined through hunting
activities and the destruction or severe modification of natural habitats;
and, increased sheep browsing resulted in declining native vegetation
regeneration and seedlings, declining swaths of native grasses and tuber-
ous perennials, increasing soil compaction, run-off and erosion, decreas-
ing soil fertility, and the easy transfer of exotic and noxious plant seeds.
For Imagery, traits evident are: this phase witnessed a growing search
for allegiance to this landscape, and its exploration through art, literature,
architecture, and garden design to draw out its inner qualities and tex-
tures; colonials sought to read and interpret the landscape through clear
eyes; artistic images sought to explore and express the environment’s
tonal qualities in cultivated landscape scenes; literature sought to shrug
off allegiance to ‘weird melancholy’ by exploring the sensory nuances of
senses; garden design sought to accommodate aesthetic notions in a more
naturalistic design style receptive to the landscape’s patterns and qualities;
and architecture sought to adapt microclimatic issues and the region’s
stone to fashionable European design styles.
* * *
Adamson and Fox (1981: 123–126), Allen (1950: 18–25), Anderson

(1969: 105, 110–113, 115, 122, 123–125), Anon (n.d.: 1, 1873a: 65,
1873b: 25, 1924: 554–556), Australian Council of National Trusts
[ACNT] (1973: 216–217, 221, 258, 1976: 232, 236, 258, 1983:
188–193), Baillieu (1982: 38), Barnes (1986, 86–87, 88, 89, 91–93),
Bassett (1954, 433–434, 535), Beer (1989: 65–68), Bennett (1982:
230–239), Best et al. eds. (1990), Birch (1992: 229–234), Bird (1986: 8,
9), ‘Boldrewood’ (1969: 14, 37, 119, 139–140, 145, 154, 196, 198),
Bolton (1981: 90–93), Bonwick (1970: 30–31, 33, 166, fn 5 on 44, fn 9
on 44–45, fn 18 on 173), Bonyhady (1985: 53–59, plates 8, 17, 18,
1986: 19, 20–21, 22–23, 46–51, 180–183), Bride (1969: 168–169,
335–336), Brown (1987: 12), Bruce (1980: 40, 59, 62), Brunner et al.
(1980: 6–14), Calder (1987: 102–106), Cantlon (1967: 56–57, 62),
Carter (1992: 438–439), Chapman (1965: 8–11, 18, 21, 22, 23, 31,
38–45, 46–54, 55, 56, 58, 66, 70–75), Chauncy (1972: Vol. 2, 233–234),
Clark and Whitelaw (1985: 64–65, 104–105, 107–108, 130–131),
Clarke (1876: v–vi), Clarke (1972, 361–368, 466–467), Cole (1984:
13), Comstock (1974: 96), Conley (1984, 18, 19), Connah (1988: 88,
89, 99–100), Conole (1987: 105–107), Cornish (1975: 61, 147, 158,
159, 160, 171, 172–173, 174–176), Corrick (1982: 69–87), Critchett
(1990: 155, 191), Daley (1924: 52), Davidson (1991: 181–182), Dennis
(1963: 61, 66–67, 71, 97–98, 99, 118, 134), Dingle (1985: 101, 102,
356 D. S. Jones
103, 104–106, 107, 110–111), Dixon (1892: 195–206), Dunstan (1990:

48, 51–52), Duruz (1974: 21, 28), Elliott (1967: 13, 24–26, 82–83),
Emison (1990: 7–10), Emison et al. (1975: 3–5, 9, 10, 12, 17–20,
22–23, 24, 27, 28–30, 35, 36–38, 39), Emison et al. (1978: 290, 292,
293, 294, 301–302, 349–350, 354, 356), Evans (1993), Ewart (1909: 1,
21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 36, 37, 46, 86, 90), Fennessy (1962: 221–240), Fleay
(1932: 63–68), Foucault (1980: 77), Fox (1985: 24, 34, 35), Fraser
(1981: 3/90, 3/91, 3/92, 3/93, 3/100, 3/101, 3/102, 3/104, 3/105;
3/106–107, 3/118, 3/119, 3/120, 3/138, 3/139, 3/158, 3/167), Froude
(1886: 104–105), Froude (1985: 44–49), Gilmore et al. (1979: 56, 57,
58, 59, 63, 67, 69), Gordon (1962: 116), Gray (1977: iii, 187, 188–213,
217, 222, 223, 224, 225, 231–232, 233–234, 235–236, 238, illustra-
tions 182, 219), Gray (1978: 17, 19, 23, 25), Grayson and Mahony
(1910: 24), Haddow (1987), Haddow (1988a: 421–425, 1988b:
306–308), Hamilton (1880: 24–26), Hamilton (1892: 178–239),
Hamilton (1981: 100), Hansen and McLachlan (1912: v–vi), Hansen
(1988: 6–7, 16, 17, no’s 7, 17, 53, 64), Harrigan (1962: 87–90), Harris
(1971: 365–376), Hawley and McKinlay (1974: 14), Hay (1989a: 7,
1989b: 8), Heathcote (1969: 176–177, 180), Hebb (1970, 136–153,
278, 377), Hercus (1988: 4–8), Hergenham (1972: 363), Hodge (1988:
16, 17, 19, 20), Hoff (1949: 188), Jacka (1988: 26, 30, 49, 51, 53, 79,
81, 138, 212), Jackson and Davies (1983: 48), Jellie (1989: 3.43, 3.44,
3.45), Jellie et al. (1989, n.p.), Jones (1969: 224–228), Jones (1984: 277,
278, 1991): 2, 5, 6, 9, 13–16), Joyce (1984: 1), Kerr (1865), Key (1945),
Kiddle (1962: 63–65, 97, 109–114, 200, 207–208, 244, 283, 290–291,
292–293, 294, 300–301, 302–303, 305, 309, 310–313–314, 315, 316,
317, 318, 320–321, 322–326, 328, 335, 339–442, 443–444, 445–446,
447, 469, 485, 542, plate opp. 318), Kingsley (1952: 1, 221, 229, 241,
321–322), Kininmonth and Kininmonth (1987: 13, 17–23, 49–50, 60,
61, 62, 67, 127–128, 200, 201), Kininmonth (1984: 91, 94, 95), Koehn
and Morison (1990: 15, 16–17, 18), Koehn and O’Connor (1990:
5–12); L P Planning (1980: 33–34, 35–36, 45–46, 118), Land
Conservation Council (1976: 104–109, 248–249, 287–289, 291–292,
293–294, 295), Land Conservation Council (1978: 129), Lang et al.
(1952: 17–19, 28–30, 31–33, 49–61, 63–67, 68–73, 185–187, 196,
223–226), Le Souef (1965: 10–15, 16–17, 18–19, 21, 22–26), Lewis
(1985: 120, 123, 124–125, 126), Logan (1966: 154–170, 1968: 133,
134–135), Loudon (1838: 162, 166), MacDonald (1982: 18, 22, 23,
118–119), Mack (1988: 61, 63, 82, 84, 104, 116–117, 123, 133),
Magazanik (1992), Mahoney (1982: 15–36), Maiden (1975: 511–514),
Main (1993: 25), Manifold (1984: 118, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134–135,
137, 161, 178, 179, 184, 188, 189, 193, 203–209, 210, 211), Mansergh
(1983: 109, 110, 116, 117–118), Marriott (1992: 4), Massola (1966:
136, 1968: 318, 1969: 55, 60, 1970a: 98–99, 1970b: 300, 304–305),
McAlpine (1963: 4–5, 6–12, 34, 39–40, 81, 95, 143), McConville and
Moloney (1987: 4–8), McGregor and Oaten (1985: 1, 7, 8, 11–12, 14,
15–16, 25, 26, 29–30, 35, 37, 91, 93, 94), McLaren (1987: 29, 40),
McLellan (1989: 28–29, 30), Mellick (1983: 72–73), Menkhorst and
Beardsell (1982: 228–230, 234, 235, 236, 237–238, 239, 240, 241),
MHSBC (1985: 19, 26, 33, 34–35, 38, 39, 40–41, 45, 47, 55, 142,
149–150, 154–155, 158, 164–165), Miller (1972: 8–27, 37), Moore
(1959: 500–513, 1962: 170–171, 174, 175, 177–178, 180–181),
Murdoch (1921: 94–100), Neale (1988: 46–52), Notman (1989: 7, 19,
40–41, 66–68, 76, 94, 96–98), Oman and Lang (1980: 10, 11, 12,
13–14, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36–37, 46–49, 50–51),
Opie (1986: 11, 12, 17, 23), Palmer (1960: 76), Parsons (1976: 49–52,
68–70, 84–87, 200–204, 232–235, 235–238, 238–243, 257–260),
Patton (1930: 160–161, 177, 183–184, 185–186, 1936: 172–190),
Pearce (1983: 24), Peel (1965: 154–173, 1971: 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82–83,
1974: 11, 29, 81, 99, 107, 108–109, 112–113, 114–115, 119–120),
Pierce (1987: 214), Pizzey (1993: 11), Poulston (1984: 25–26, 27, 28,
31, 33, 37–41, 42, 51, 52–53, 55, 58, 61, 78, 83), Powell (1967: 116,
1968: 346–347, 1971: 36–43, 1973: 134–139), Ramson (1966: 77–90,
1991: 5–19), Richardson (1946: 887, 888, 928), Robb (1962: 115, 116),
Robertson (1985: 1–25), Rolls (1969: 26, 37), Ronald (1978: 52–53),
‘Rusticus’ (1855: 6, 10, 32, 38), Sagazio (1989: 20–22, 1992: 91–95,
116–117, 118), Sawer (1962: 241–258), Sayers (1972: 2, 12, 13–14, 16,
19), Scarlett (1969: 292–294, 1988: 146–149), Seaton (1988: 197),
Seebeck (1979: 255–264), Shaw (1969: 24–25, 32–33, 38, 71–73, 80,
82, 95–96, 121, 133, 140–141, 145–146, 157–158, 164, 174–175, 184,
185, 191–192, 194, 196, 199, fn 7 on 185, plate 27), Smith (1971: 62,
1975: 132–140), Sowden (1972: 164–167, 171, 188–191), Spicer (1988:
358 D. S. Jones
32–35, 1989: 44–48), Starforth (1853), Stephens (1977: 397, 1991:

1–30), Stuwe (1986: 1–22, 33), Sutton (1916: 112–123, 1917: 128–143),
Tanner (1979: 68, 70, 74, no. 97), Thomas (1869: 62, 1977: 5, 1988: 40,
62, 100–101, 102–103, 118–119), Thomson (1989: 1–22, 49–52,
1989b: 1, 31–32, 49–52, 79–80), Trollope (1873: ch. 29), Turton (1968,
35–44, 83, 88, 96–97, 101, 143, 152, 163, 164), ‘Twain’ (1897: 154,
174, 177, 224, 229, 230), ‘Vagabond’ (1981: 63, 70, 71, 72–73, 74, 76,
79, 80, 81, 83, 86–89, 91, 92, 93–94, 95, 96–99, 100–101, 103–105),
Vines (1990: 13, 16–17, 21, 27–32, 37), Viollet-le-Duc (1864-1868: 10
vols), von Mueller (1884: n.p.), Waring and McQuoid (1850), Watts
(1983: 25–26, 28, 30, 32–33, 43, 44–49, 58, 108, 111, 112–113,
114–115, 117, 121–122, 127, 128–129, 130–131, 132, 137, 139–143,
144–145, 206), Wettenhall (1945: 24–46), Whitehead and Whitehead
(1986: 66, 67), Whitelaw (1976: 11), Whitelaw (1985: 54–57),
Willingham (1983: 60, 62, 64, 68, 73, 75, 77, 78–80, 82, 84–121,
142–144, 146, 156, 158–159, 160–164, 169, 172–179, 274, 280,
295–296, 312), Willingham (1984: 66, 67–69, 70–78, 1987: 4, 5, 8, 9,
10, 18, 19–21, 23), Willis (1963: 162–168, 1964: 403–404, 1984:
31–33, 1988: 137), Wilson (1887, 83–87), Winter–Cooke pers. comm.,
1992), Yule (1988: 29, 48, 53, 54, 72–85, 84–85, 91–92, fn 23 on 38,
53, 84–85).
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7
Salient Threads and Contemporary
Narratives
7.1 Introduction
This chapter draws on the qualitative information from the preceding
four chapters and charts an assessment of writings that have occurred for
this landscape since 1993, towards understanding the values that influ-
ence human sensibilities inside this landscape, thus, the nuances that
shape and determine human interpretations of and responses to this place.
For the former, using the theoretical framework of Domains, Pathways,
Gathering Places, Shelters, Plants, Animals, Imagery, and Rhythms is
qualitatively summarised and thereupon quantitatively evaluated as to
their weight of influence upon our human landscape sensibilities and
values, and the activities as human we have partaken of as a consequence.
For the latter, a post-1993 literature mapping has been undertaken using
the same theoretical framework categories to quantitatively measure the
spatial location patterns and framework concentrations of narratives
published about the landscape to assess any patterns and trends.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_7
372 D. S. Jones
7.2 Salient Threads

In this section, the framework patterns of Domains, Pathways, Gathering
Places, Shelters, Plants, Animals, Imagery, and Rhythms are drawn
together into a cogent qualitative translation, before being evaluated as to
their strength of influence nuance shaping and human interpretations
responsiveness of and to place.
Under Domains, prior to colonisation, nine traits are evident. These
include: (1) there was a purposeful sense responsibility to care for the
landscapes’ biological health which was enshrined in Aboriginal belong-
ingness to their hereditary Country, and knowledge of one’s location and
self that explained one’s role and responsibility to that landscape; (2)
space was multi-layered in purpose and role, and divided in responsibility
according to language, moiety descent, and land usage thresholds, but
interconnected by neutral and collective tracts, places, and pathways; (3)
boundaries were distinctive yet permeable and often extensive according
to environmental factors and the relevant myths and traditions; (4) spa-
tial delimitation recognised equity of resource access and communal
sharing of spaces and resources during times and seasons of little or
plenty, and Country’s often involved two or more ecosystems; (5) ‘Title’
to land or Country was validated by knowledge and expression of the
place names, myths, and songs relevant to that tract; (6) linguistic com-
monalities were a binding thread in Country delimitation and clan activ-
ities; (7) the volume of space and the intensity of occupation prompted
the creative and equitable dissection of landscape through subtle means,
having regard to rich natural habitats or tracts; (8) place names were an
extremely important element in the landscape. They identified space,
acted as signposts, celebrated past events, and re-ignited the mythic con-
sciousness of Aboriginals; and (9) each name possessed a library of knowl-
edge that could be instructional or informative and could pertain to
mythological events and passages, contemporary Aboriginal history and
incidents, or bio-geographical information about the resources, micro-
climatic patterns, or geographical form of the site.
During the contact phase, under Domains, nine traits are evident: (1)
European system of cultural rules and traditions about land was quickly
7 Salient Threads and Contemporary Narratives 373
transposed upon this landscape and progressively modified to suit colo-

nial objectives thereupon prescribing ownership responsibilities, spatial
arrangements of land holdings, and boundary demarcation approaches
establishing a Western-informed secure backbone to colonial land rela-
tionships; (2) boundaries were distinctively etched or erected on the
ground surface, often as lines joining and following natural and cultural
features or corridors, using available natural resources; (3) space was
treated as singular and materialistic, and divided to fulfil economic objec-
tives and functions relevant to the production of sheep; (4) ‘Title’ to land
was validated by paper-based descriptive referents; (5) neutral spaces and
corridors were progressively resumed to permit communal meeting
points and settlements, to assist passages through the landscape, and to
conserve some environmental resources as communal assets; (6) ‘runs’
formed spatial units analogous to Aboriginal spatial sub-Country’s in
terms of size and self-sufficiency requirements, yet this system was
uncomprehended by colonials; (7) naming features and spatial arrange-
ments on the landscape enabled colonials to assert control and possession
over the space, and to introduce a new set of meanings or associations to
designated points; (8) landscape surveyors used names like reference co-
ordinates to locate and define spaces created on paper, and (9) Aboriginal
etymology was readily appropriated by colonials and transplanted to
define their spaces and points (especially for run, parish and place names).
Post-colonisation, under Domains, six traits are evident: (1) landscape
was subjected to increasing fragmentation and spatial delineation by sale,
selection, fencing, railway easement, and political devolution; (2) survey
completion resulted in the geometric partitioning and definition of land-
scape; (3) land ownership was expressed by possession of paper defini-
tions that granted indefeasible title and enabled easy transferability; (4) a
growing identification to the landscape heightened communal bonds to
a shared sense of destiny; (5) vernacular descriptive referents were readily
adopted to aid explanations of places, features, and objects in the land-
scape; and (6) successive layers of names were laid across features and
places in the landscape as myths, stories, scientific information, and
political structures evolved.
Under Pathways, prior to colonisation, four traits are evident. These
include: (1) journeying through landscape was necessary to enable the
374 D. S. Jones
acquisition of mythological, symbolic, and biological information about

Country and about the songlines that traversed it; (2) major pathways
and songlines generally correlate to neutral trade routes, the criss-crossing
passage ways of Dreaming ancestors, and to north-south natural corri-
dors that were aligned with or linked to perennial water sources; (3) path-
ways interconnected places of trade, ceremony, artifice, harvest and hunt,
and facilitated the transfer of artefacts, raw material, foodstuffs, news,
stories, and myths; and (4) pathways were characteristically aligned to
perennial watercourses or natural breaks and valleys in topography com-
ing together at junctures in these landscape features.
During the contact phase, under Pathways, three traits are evident: (1)
journeying through the landscape was essential to discover its qualities and
to lay claim to its resources, but it was often a lonely activity allowing the
great expanse to infuse contemplative and self-questioning thoughts into
the minds of travellers; (2) roads were extremely important in the convey-
ance of information and goods, but also acted as umbilical connexions
with fellow colonials, assisting the flow of European culture, thereby
reducing their sense of isolation; (3) having been carved by human and
beast, pathways were recognisable tracks delineated by mud, dust, and
ruts that wandered aimlessly through the landscape generally east-west
across the open plains, in contrast to natural corridors and the main
Aboriginal routes, thereby prolonging the sense of monotony and isolation.
Post-colonisation, under Pathways, three traits are evident: (1) as
modes of travel diversified a sense of romanticism motivated attitudes to
and interpretation of the landscape by travellers; (2) journey routes, rail
and road, were formally enclosed into linear corridors, and embellished
with bridges, culverts, signs, posts, and travel-related service structures;
and (3) railways became an influential symbol of progress in the landscape.
Under Gathering Places, prior to colonisation, four traits are evident.
These include: (1) three functionally and locationally distinct types of
places were resident in the landscape, and each played a major role in the
system of rules, traditions and patterns observed by Aboriginal inhabit-
ants; (2) ‘places for daily living’ were often strategically located for view,
water, and shelter needs, and at junctures of micro-environments, whereby
they were regularly occupied according to season and climate to service
semi-sedentary hunting, gathering, cooking, weaving, and artifice
production activities; (3) ‘places of sacred meaning’ were infrequently vis-

ited, often located at or adjacent to unusual natural features or amphithe-
atres, they serviced ceremonial, spiritual and myth nurturing activities,
and held deep symbolic meanings; and (4) ‘places for cultural interaction’
were seasonally visited, often involving large open spaces that afforded
perennial water to service and space to accommodate large gatherings, and
were linked to either major trade or food harvesting and sharing events.
During the contact phase, under Gathering Places, four traits are evi-
dent. These include: (1) there is a strong correlation between Aboriginal
and colonial site selection of places for daily living activities and recre-
ational pursuits; (2) ‘places for daily living’ involved homesteads that were
often strategically located for view, water and shelter needs at junctures in
micro-environments enabling easy access to a range of food and fodder
resources, and timber supplies, to facilitate construction activities; (3)
‘places of spiritual meaning’ were created by incident and chance so they
occur in more isolated locations unrelated to natural resources, and as a
consequence were infrequently visited yet held deep symbolic meanings;
and (4) ‘places for cultural interaction’ were points located either at cross-
ing places on perennial streams or springs, or at unusual natural features
that were linked to abundant water supplies, and permitted the establish-
ment of inns and settlements to serve travellers and homestead ‘villages’.
Post-colonisation, under Gathering Places, five traits are evident. These
include: (1) homestead ‘villages’ lost their traditionally dominant role in
the landscape to townships, and became more reclusive and seasonally
active communities; (2) townships acquired a greater diversity of struc-
ture types and functions as their population and position in the landscape
increased; (3) while most places of activity continued on their original
sites, the numbers of homestead ‘villages’ and revered gathering places
across the landscape increased due to disparities in township size and fre-
quency resulting from economic activities, and station fragmentation; (4)
unusual natural features associated with perennial water supplies gained
more importance as regional nodes of public resort; and (5) the number
of nostalgic markers, including cairns, memorials and cemeteries,
increased and became more formalised to accord with European traditions.
Under Shelters, prior to colonisation, two traits are evident. These
include: (1) stone (or scoria, unquarried bluestone) was the dominant
376 D. S. Jones
form giving raw material used in the assembly of human engineered or

constructed works, in the fabrication and composition of artefacts, with
timber provided, often, the secondary role in either supporting or prop-
ping structures, or acting as a temporary structural material; and (2) shel-
ter construction took advantage of available timber, and stone when
timber was limited, and had regard to micro-climatic issues in their
design and form.
During the contact phase, under Shelters, six traits are evident. These
include: (1) designs for colonial structures explored the use of timber,
bluestone, verandahs, and British stylistic traditions of architecture in an
attempt to realise suitable shelter arrangements and forms that minimised
climatic impacts and provided reasonable human comforts; (2) Aboriginal
structures quickly deteriorated or were destroyed due to their lightness
and fragility of construction; (3) considerable attention was given to
designing and constructing colonial structures that celebrated and assisted
in the production and shearing of fleece; (4) collections of either timber
or bluestone structures, with differing functions, were erected around the
activity nodes of homesteads, inns, or fords, creating village-like encamp-
ments; (5) building construction relied upon the creative use of natural
resources, progressively shifting from raw materials, to cut timber, to
stone, as construction technologies improved; and (6) building siting dis-
played a need to locate near perennial fresh water supplies, leeward shel-
ter, a vantage outlook, and an expanse of arable soil and flat pastures for
flock pasturage thereupon tending to correlate with favoured Aboriginal
encampment locations.
Post-colonisation, under Shelters, four traits are evident. These include:
(1) a remarkable building boom occurred creating a regional unity and
legacy in structure design, form and texture; (2) a mixed Gothicism-
Classicism stylistic language was explored in church, homestead, wool-
shed, outbuilding, and bridge designs with modifications to lighten
building appearances and to soften impacts from the harsh environment;
(3) structure siting sought to take advantage of prominent or vantage
points to enhance and symbolise colonial control over the landscape; and
(4) creative architectural use of bluestone in the design and detailing of
structures sought to expose its inner qualities and warmth.
Under Plants, prior to colonisation, five traits are evident. These

include: (1) while the predominant and characteristic community of the
landscape was a rich complex of savannah grasses the monotony was bro-
ken and enriched by expanses of savannah woodlands, riparian or saline
threads or niches, and shrubby stony rises that provided resources and
opportunities not available on the open volcanic plains to both human
and animal populations; (2) vegetation was regularly renourished by
deliberate Aboriginal acts of firing and natural agriculture that stimulated
species regeneration and seed diffusion; (3) vegetation fibres and timbers
were important raw materials in the fabrication and composition of arte-
facts relevant to daily hunting, gathering and cooking routines; (4) incre-
mental and continuous Aboriginal landscape activities, albeit tangibly
small, had cumulative and important effects upon the landscape’s vegeta-
tion mosaic; and (5) roots, berries, fruits, bark, leaves, and so on of veg-
etation provided a rich and diverse resource of dietary and medicinal
substances that could maintain and sustain animal and human popula-
tions throughout the seasons.
During the contact phase, under Plants, five traits are evident. These
include: (1) all vegetation communities were subjected to severe destabi-
lisation due to rampant felling and firing, introduction of competitive
species, browsing and trampling by hoofed animals, and the removal of
traditional fire regimes resulting in a decline of Summer perennial grasses
and fragile upper storey vegetation; (2) the scale of tree and shrub loss
was rapid and extensive and established the ‘treelessness’ myth about the
landscape; (3) exotic vegetation was introduced to improve the quality of
fodder grasses, to diversify colonial dietary resources, and to embellish
homesteads; (4) little regard was given to the dietary, medicinal, and
fibrous properties of indigenous plants for colonial consumption and
artefact fabrication arising from Aboriginal wilful negation from con-
tinuing natural agricultural practices, heavy browsing by sheep, and pre-
vention of firings that resulted in a decline in available tuberous food
plants and overall native plant germination; and (5) reduction of
Aboriginal firing practices limited bushfire frequency, but increased the
magnitude of impacts and the psychological fear and aura associated with
bushfires.
378 D. S. Jones
Post-colonisation, under Plants, seven traits are evident. These include:

(1) a growing emphasis on pasture and cereal crop experimentation and
specialisation resulting in a decline of native grassland species; (2) home-
stead site enrichment using both exotic and Australasian species in
Gardenesque styles was energetically undertaken to satisfy aesthetic, hor-
ticultural and symbolic objectives; (3) shelterbelt plantings were com-
menced, primarily using native species, adopting linear lines of fences
and boundaries as plantation corridors; (4) felling of vegetation was con-
centrated on the forested edges of the plains, but extensive swamp and
stream drainage works were undertaken to expand pasture and cereal cul-
tivation opportunities; (5) garden designs around homesteads sought to
use views, visual axes, microclimatic considerations, water bodies, shel-
tered locations, and aesthetic notions to create distinctive sub-regional
garden types; (6) while an open savannah exotic grassland devoid of trees
was being created by pastoral establishment, the area of open savannah
woodlands was rapidly decreasing negating tree regeneration; and (7) the
seeds of numerous exotic noxious species were diffused throughout the
landscape.
Under Animals, prior to colonisation, seven traits are evident. These
include: (1) the spectrum of animals resident in the landscape occupied a
powerful presence and an often controlling influence over Aboriginal
experiences and relationships, both day and night, and as part of a larger
biological food cycle; (2) Aboriginals maintained special kinships and
bonds with animals through mytho-totemic connexions and celebrated
their presence and aura in myth, story, song, and tale; (3) fishery manage-
ment technology, through imaginative and extensive networks of
impoundments, basins, and dikes from available stone, prolonged water
retention throughout the year to the advantage of fish, animal and
human; (4) selective and indirect management of important animal
resources—eels, fish, kangaroos, emus, bird eggs—resulted in seasonally
reliable food resources establishing a long-term sustainable ecological bal-
ance in the roles, predator relationships, and the fecundity of animals
against population imbalances or deleterious impacts upon vegetative
food resources; (5) important seasons for animal food resources were
winter and summer in contrast to plant food resources that were lean,
and that sheltered perennial fresh and salt water bodies were a major
focus for animal habitats and roaming catchments determining daily and
migratory movement patterns; (6) Aboriginal ideology invested religious
responsibilities in individuals and clans through animals ensuring the
perpetuation of species associated with particular beings in anticipation
of the return of Dreaming ancestors; and (7) incremental and continuous
Aboriginal landscape activities, albeit tangibly small, had cumulative and
important manipulative effects upon controlling faunal and avifaunal
populations and habitats in the landscape.
During the contact phase, under Animals, five traits are evident. These
include: (1) the sheep imperative influenced attitudes to land and ele-
vated the animal to mytho-totemic status as squatters sought to breed
them, protect them from prey and Aboriginals, expand their pastures,
and efficiently shear their fleece; (2) native animal communities were
subject to severe destabilisation through rampant colonial hunting activi-
ties, competition with introduced species, and the destruction of nesting
and browsing habitats; (3) colonials used some native animals to supple-
ment their menus, and also to create symbols out of their skins and furs;
(4) exotic animals were introduced to ‘improve’ the sensory environment
of the landscape, for the joys of hunting and fishing, to assist the opera-
tion of their run, and to diversify the homesteads’ dietary resources; and
(5) the scale of loss of animals is unclear whereby through the actions of
hunting and tree destruction, it appears that small to medium herbivores
were more susceptible in contrast kangaroo populations appear to have
increased forcing mass culls.
Post-colonisation, under Animals, five traits are evident. These include:
(1) the hunting ethos to native animals continued but came to be directed
more towards rabbits; (2) while rabbits were introduced for game, their
adaptation to the landscape and population explosion resulted in exten-
sive pasture competition with sheep and their designation as a pest; (3)
sheep were elevated to mythic status, with most grazier activities seeking
to improve their pasturage and fleece through breeding, flock specialisa-
tion, pasture improvement and enclosure, non-pasture habitat destruc-
tion, and any means to reduce prey and competition for pastures; (4)
native fauna populations declined through hunting activities and the
substantive destruction or severe modification of their natural habitats;
and (5) increased sheep browsing resulted in declining native vegetation
380 D. S. Jones
regeneration and seedlings, declining swaths of native grasses and tuber-

ous perennials, increasing soil compaction, run-off and erosion, decreas-
ing soil fertility, and the easy transfer of exotic and noxious plant seeds.
Under Imagery, prior to colonisation, three traits are evident. These
include: (1) locations in the landscape were often land-based anchorages,
or parts of constellations of site in lineal passage-ways, that were
announced and explained by myth or oral literature, whereby each was an
aural and experiential page containing biological data, moral codes and
traditions, or Aboriginal ‘histories’; (2) peculiar natural landscape fea-
tures were often appropriated as installations to celebrate these myths and
literatures; (3) each locational ‘voice’ was a signpost or noticeboard of
societal rules, traditions, or ‘histories’ that steered Aboriginal responsi-
bilities and attitudes for the future, relationships to the past, and their
obligations to the landscape.
During the contact phase, under Imagery, four traits are evident. These
include: (1) an excessive preoccupation with landscape and description
that created a series of paintings, poems, and novels possessing scientific
records in their detail of documentation or their attempts to explain the
qualities and nuances of a scene; (2) paintings, poems and novels were
more often centred upon pastoral icons (homesteads, woolsheds, sheep,
bushfires) and sublime features (lakes, hills, waterfalls) than explaining
the open plains; (3) paintings, poems and novels provided influential
media to elevate both the pastoral icons and their representations to
mythical status; and (4) cognitive and experiential readings of the land-
scape were severely tinted by European notions of aesthetics and
Romanticism in art and literature.
Post-colonisation, under Imagery, two traits are evident. These include:
(1) a growing search for allegiance to this landscape, and its exploration
through art, literature, architecture, and garden design to draw out its
inner qualities and textures; (2) colonials sought to read and interpret the
landscape through ‘clear eyes’, including artistic images that sought to
explore and express the environment’s tonal qualities in cultivated land-
scape scenes, literature that sought to shrug off allegiance to ‘weird mel-
ancholy’ by exploring the sensory nuances of senses, garden designs that
sought to accommodate aesthetic notions in a more naturalistic design
style receptive to the landscape’s patterns and qualities, and architecture
that sought to adapt microclimatic issues and the region’s stone to fash-
ionable European design styles.
Under Rhythms, nine traits are evident. These include: (1) stories,
myths, and cultural belief constructs structured the activities and rituals
of successive human generations in creating a distinctive culturally modi-
fied landscape in this savannah grassland and woodland; (2) animals,
often elevated to symbolic status, were and are strongly linked to natural
features in myths and stories about this landscape; (3) more powerful
myths or stories incorporated and explained unusual natural features in
the landscape; (4) seasonal changes can be discerned by signals in plant
and animal flowering, fruiting, reproduction and migratory patterns; (5)
cyclical patterns in plant and animal systems strongly determine human
activities and relationships with the landscape; (6) the strong horizontal-
ity of the landscape forced humans to be more acutely aware of subtle
sensory qualities and changes in the environment, especially to relieve the
sense of climatic monotony; (7) the landscape’s horizontality pushed
human focus upwards to be more conscious and watchful of changing
patterns and signs in day and night skies; (8) the sky radiated a remark-
able sense of energy, manifest especially in its light intensity, and in the
features of the sun and stars; and (9) bushfires created a singular aura of
fear and energy about their intensity and presence.
Tables 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 provide summative quantitative weighted
assessments and evaluations as to the nuances that shape and determine
Table 7.1 Thematic mapping and evaluation—pre-colonisation 1800–1840s

Theme Low High
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Pre-contact
Domains * * * * * * * * * * *
Pathways * * * * * * * * *
Gathering Places * * * * * * * * * *
Shelters * * * * * *
Plants * * * * * * * *
Animals * * * * * * * *
Imagery * * * * * * * * * * *
Rhythms * * * * * * * * * * *
Source: Author
382 D. S. Jones
Table 7.2 Thematic mapping and evaluation—colonisation transition 1830s–1870s

Theme Low High
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Colonisation
Domains * * * * * * * * * *
Pathways * * *
Gathering Places * *
Shelters * * *
Plants * *
Animals * *
Imagery * * * *
Rhythms * * * * * * * * * * *
Source: Author
Table 7.3 Thematic mapping and evaluation—post-colonisation 1860s–1900

Theme Low High
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Post-colonisation
Domains * * * * * * * *
Pathways * * * * *
Gathering Places * * * * *
Shelters * * * * * * * *
Plants * * * * * *
Animals * * * * * *
Imagery * * * * * * * *
Rhythms * * * * * * * * * * *
Source: Author
human interpretations of and responses to this place for the respective

overlapping temporal periods as set out in Chaps. 3–6.
As Table 7.1 depicts, the qualitative strengths of place relationships
and spiritual manifestations were very rich within Aboriginal cultural
sensitivities of this landscape. This richness is endemic of the nature of a
Country’s tapestry, but also its co-relationships with adjacent Country’s,
the significant position and contribution of language and the speaking/
reading of Country, the role that seasonality plays in spatial relationship
construction and engagement, and the position of humans within

Country as a direct co-designer in partnership with all aspects of Country
as well as nature (including variables like climate change). Importantly,
there is the need to recognise that this phase, despite the conscious (e.g.
Country and language possession and disenfranchisement) and uncon-
scious (e.g. disease, cessation, and prevention of traditional practices and
speaking of language) agendas of colonisation, substantially continues
today as a philosophy by respective Aboriginal communities when engag-
ing with and discussing their own Country.
during this phase of cultural and landscape upheaval were very much
driven by conscious and unconscious colonisation agendas set by colonial
governance policies and aims, administrator values transposed from the
UK ideas and colonial New South Wales experiences to date, and reli-
gious proponents. Core was the desire to take change of ‘uncharted
domains’ and all within to advantage, to carve out venues to host sheep
as an economic imperative and to lay waste land, vegetations, humans,
and so on, to achieve this aim, all with little concern as to the physical,
emotional, human, and spiritual consequences of these actions that
wreaked havoc across multiple Country’s and people, vegetation, and
animals alike. To the majority of these colonisers, the landscape, and
environment held no definable text articulated rules or protocols, and
there were no detailed land occupancy requisites and land tenure bound-
ary concerns like in the UK other than vague squatting rights principles
to navigate through. Thus, this ‘Australia Felix’ landscape was an
‘uncharted’ landscape to these new human intruders’ eyes and values, and
there were no landscape narratives to read, learn or appreciate. That is,
less the vagaries of unknown climates and seasonal patterns that were
interpreted as isolated incidents rather than a continuum.
during this phase reflect a major shift in colonisation priorities to one
that better read and understand the nuances of this landscape (in part).
The shifting also reflects a confidence in permanency of residence and
shelter, and a willingness to invest in ‘planning’ and ‘managing’ landscape
rather than exploiting and transforming it and taking away its health.
384 D. S. Jones
Table 7.4 Thematic mapping and evaluation—summary 1800–1900

Theme Low High
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Domains * * * * * * * * * * *
Pathways * * * * * *
Gathering Places * * * * * * *
Shelters * * * * * * * *
Plants * * * * * * *
Animals * * * * * * *
Imagery * * * * * * * * * * *
Rhythms * * * * * * * * * * *
Source: Author
Given this qualitative summation, Table 7.4 translates this informa-

tion into a summative quantitative weighted assessment and evaluation
as to the nuances that shape and determine human interpretations of and
responses to this place.
Table 7.4 points to the high propensity and correlation of the themes
of Domains, Imagery, and Rhythms figuring in the minds of human
decisions and activities on this landscape. Interestingly, these three themes
comprise and envelope the essence of what many scholars interpret as
‘sense of place’ values.
The variations in the other themes per Pre-contact, Colonisation, and
Post-colonisation temporal phases reflect human priorities during these
phases of landscape occupancy, care, and exploitation as to the nuances
that shape and determine human interpretations of and responses to
this place.
7.3 Contemporary Narratives

Table 7.5 surveys patterns in literature and narratives since the core
research for this project was undertaken. The mapping of 1990s–2020s
published literature is cross-tabulated by temporal phase and theme to
aid ease of visual appraisal of the concentrations of literature over these
years. The numerical scope of the literature is as comprehensive as
Table 7.5 Contemporary 1990s–2020s narratives temporally and themati-

cally mapped
Theme 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s
Domains AV (1993), Builth Australia (2017), Cary (2020),
Blake (1998), (2002), Bowler et al. Courtney
Context Cahir (2018), Builth (2020),
(1993), Forth (2001), (2010), Cahir Nicholson et al.
(1998), LCC Clark and (2019), Context (2021),
(1996, 1997), Heydon (2000, 2012a, b, Threadgold
Lovett- (2002), FAT c, d, e, 2013), (2020), Wilkie
Gardiner et al. Dolce and Clark (2020), Wilkie
(1997), (2004), (2014), et al. (2020)
McNiven GHCMA Gunditjmara
(1998), et al. et al. (2010),
McNiven (2008), Herron (2016),
(1994), Niewójt Jones and Roös
McNiven (2009), (2019), Joyce
et al. (1999), Pascoe (2010), Justin
Pascoe (2003), and Clark
(1997), Weir (2009) (2014), PV
Wettenhall (2015),
(1999) Planisphere
(2013), Powell
and Jones
(2018), Powell
et al. (2019),
Rowe and
Jacobs (2010),
Roös (2017),
W(WAC) (2018),
Whitehead
(2018)
Pathways Eccleston Eccleston (2018),
(1992) Morrow and
Greig (2019)
(continued)
386 D. S. Jones
Table 7.5 (continued)
Theme 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

Gathering Clark (1995) Clark (2007), Byrne et al. Hogan (2020)
Places Gerritsen (2010), Clark
(2000), (2014a, b),
Pascoe Edquist (2010b),
(2007) McNiven et al.
(2015), McNiven
et al. (2018),
Norris et al.
(2012), Norris
et al. (2013),
Roös (2015),
Ryan (2016),
Ryan (2017),
Sherwood
(2018),
Sherwood et al.
(2018), Stout
et al. (c.2015),
Watson and
Clark (2014)
Shelters CAC (2006), Allen and Baker
Edquist (2015), Allen
(2009), and Baker
Lane (2017), Edquist
(2008), (2010a), Edquist
McNiven (2019a, b),
(2009) McNiven and
Bell (2010),
McNiven et al.
(2012a, b, 2017)
Plants Lunt et al. Allinson APS (2012), BCN
(1998), PV (2006), Carr (2010a, b),
(c.1997) et al. Brittain (2018),
(2006), Carr Cahir et al.
et al. (2018),
(2008), Dearnaley
Sparrow (2019), Pascoe
and (2014),
Pritchard Patterson
(2004), (2013), Pescott
Trigg and (2017), Rogers
Trigg (2018), Thurstan
(2000) et al. (2018)
(continued)
Table 7.5 (continued)
Theme 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s

Animals Pescott (1998), Reynolds CCMA (2015,
et al. 2018), GFNC
(2005), (2011, 2018),
Wilson et al.
(2019)
Imagery Bantow et al. Clark (2002), Baulch (2012),
(1995), Johns Cooper- Edwards et al.
et al. (1998) Lavery (2016), GG
(2005), (2013),
Norris and Hamacher
Hamacher (2011), Inglis
(2009) and McDonald
(2014), Norris
and Hamacher
(2011), Powell
(2015a, b, c, d,
e, f, g, h, i, j, k),
Zachariah (2017)
Rhythms Jones (1993), FGG (2007), Arts Victoria Eccles and Jones
Jones (1997), Jones (2016), Barr (2020),
O’Neill (2002), (2010), Gibson Nicholson et al.
(1999) Read et al. (2010), Heyes (2020),
(2007) and Tuiteci Steffensen
(2013), Jones (2020),
et al. (2018), Wadawurrung
Nicholson et al. Traditional
(2019) Owners
Aboriginal
Corporation
(WTOAC)
(2020a, b)
Source: Author
possible but not exhaustive. Key patterns are an exponential explosion of

literature in the 2000s allied to archaeological investigations and a growth
in Aboriginal authored/co-authored reports and narratives parallel to lan-
guage rejuvenation and revival aligned to their new-found designations as
Registered Aboriginal Parties (RAP) under the Victorian Aboriginal
Heritage Act 2006 (Victoria 2006), and the maturation of RAPs in
388 D. S. Jones
speaking Country on topics. Interestingly the literature in the 2010s is

across all themes, but with concentrations in the Domains (or Aboriginal
Country theme), Gathering Places (linked to major archaeological inves-
tigations), and Imagery (where aspects of Country are being narrated
through voice or art exhibition).
Table 7.5 also provides an interesting indicator of the fact that this
place, this landscape, is now being narrated confidentiality by both
Aboriginal and coloniser authors with co-design/cross-cultural co-
authorship now occurring.
7.4 Sense Place of the Western

District Landscape
Every place has a genius, a vocabulary of memories and expectations,
and a set of voices within, that may be read or sensed, but are often
constituted in a sign or name. To Aboriginals, that genius holds more a
portent form than a simple point in ‘history’ and ‘place’ enveloped in
Western definitions. Identity, time, traces, and moral principles were
and are all woven together in a four-dimensional landscape of places
that spoke and continue to speak about mythic Dreaming ancestors,
about systems of rules and values that organise and regulate life, and
about metaphorical animals and features that reinforce totemic associa-
tions. To Aboriginals, place was existence; loss of place and the experi-
ential maps attached thereto was loss of self. Places, linkages, and their
associated spaces became venerated icons in reiterated narratives—
myths and historical tales that provided the linkages between Aboriginals
and ‘their Country’.
Place could and continues to imply Country a landscape of a vast
extent, or a simple waterhole. Indeed, place comprises the earthly envi-
ronment of habitation, the landscapes of cloudland and beyond, or
Ummekulleen [Country places underground]. In this way, place holds
latent physical and metaphysical connotations. Consequently, each land-
scape contains a vast collection of stories. Each Country was a tract within
these narratives that acted as a foil for the fusion of time and space into
geographical repositories of meaning. Features in the landscape were and
are symbolic of Country’s, constituting rules for ways of living, and
engendering a continuum of moral character and culture according to
the metacommunicative messages in myths and stories. Places were and
are formed and created by Dreaming ancestors through their daily camp-
ing, hunting, and fighting activities: hills were shaped, waterholes were
diffused, fire was passed about. Central in Aboriginal ‘oral literature’ is
the re-enactment of these events and passages by song, story, and dance
at actual sites in the myth to explain landscape creation and identifica-
tion: the ‘act’ re-awakes the ‘act’ of dreaming of that place and nurtures
into existence the spirit of that place, causing the place to come into
being again (Dawson 1881, 60).
The Western District landscape possesses all these Aboriginal values
and meanings, per Country, but also a new post-1800 colonised layer of
meanings and interpretations. The qualitative discussions in Chaps. 3–6
evidence many of these values and human relationships, and the synthesis
mapping of these in Tables 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 translates these meanings
and relationships into more tangible measurable attributes.
What is clear from this longitudinal temporal cross-cultural analysis of
place is that the traits of Domains, Imagery, and Rhythms undeniably
hold the ingredients of the ‘sense of place’ of the Western District land-
scape. Take these three out of any analysis of this place, and your appraisal,
assessment, human relationships and engagements, and an understand-
ing of values, and thereupon this place falls to pieces.
Thus, there is a triangular relationship in human consciousness and
unconsciousness between these three traits that characterise the sense of
this place, irrespective of culture.
The cross-cultural narrative of this place predominately starts with
characterising a wide expansive landscape possessing an infinity of sight-
line occasionally indispersed with strange eminences but hosting a por-
tent cloak of stories and meanings both tangible and intangible to the
human eye and mind.
390 D. S. Jones
7.5 Translating Place and the Strengths

and Nuances of Its Human Relationships:
Going Forward
In going forward, the concept of genius loci needs a more intimate
appraisal than simply the upper-level discussions that have been enter-
tained to date. Our Western sensibilities have very much been influenced
by our societal jump into the scientific validation realm, when landscape
became a commodity from an entity to beholden and respect, when the
‘machine entered the garden’ (Marx 2000), and when Western landscapes
were recast into industrial fields. In so doing, the long-held interaction of
self with place was cast aside and intuitive engagement lost (Grieves
2009; Rose 1988, 1996; Sangha et al. 2015).
Seddon (1979), Jones (1993), and Brook (2000) have ventured into
this realm offering frameworks to better understand and translate the
weft of each tapestry. Seddon and Brook have both offered conceptual
frameworks in the absence of any testing, whereas Jones has offered a
framework positioned within a cross-temporal evaluation. Each offers
roadmaps in this topic.
Analogously, the translation of Country, in this chapter, holds an alter-
nate insight; one that is constructed by a deeper legacy relationship to
lands, waters, seas, and skies, but not comparable in theory and practice
to genius loci. It is a valuable contrast to ponder comparability, and to
texts and values. Within human values and relationships to landscape lies
a deeper appreciation of genius loci in Western culture. Perhaps a signifi-
cant part of human relationships to place lies in the collectivity and indi-
viduality of unpacking our cultural values to a place (Unearthed Heritage
Australia 2021, 2022). Values possess the deep conscious and uncon-
scious expressed narratives and un-written narratives of our nuances,
thoughts, feelings, and actions, and they are derived from self and being.
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8
Sense of Place Mappings
The final diary entry reads:
23rd November 1950.

A dark, wide hallway, wood panelled at points and lined in portraiture
and lithographs, provided a central spine to the old homestead. Rooms
branched off either side, opening out on to the northern verandah or inwards
to the service courtyard. Only a beautiful grandfather clock, shipped out from
England, broke the illustrative rhythm of the hallway before one entered the
library.
Positioned between the clock and the library entry was a curious paint-
ing. It was no ordinary painting done on canvas or wood. It appeared as if
a large piece of fire blackened tree bark on which were scratched figures,
animals, spears and landscape features much like my own artistic attempts.
It was just there; like some shadowy hereditary item with an un-talked
about meaning.
The image was like a iconographic black sheep of the family. Clouds stretched
across its horizon; emus, kangaroos and native companions browsed and wan-
dered on its plains; men lay in wait with axe, gun and spear; two crater-form
lakes fringed with small trees, post-and-rail fences and homesteads resembled
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7_8
404 D. S. Jones
many scenes on the plains; a cluster of natives danced or brandished spears. It

was full of life and action. A talked about forgotten page, yet placed on the wall
like a portrait of a lost family.
* * *
In the last week, I have spent time out on-Country with Wadawurrung
People experiencing the intimacy of their Country (Powell et al. 2019;
Unearthed Heritage Australia 2021; WTOAC 2020). We have journeyed
and immersed, pondered and chatted, discussed 30,000 years as if it were
yesterday, talked of the seasonality of the Golden Wattle (Acacia pycnan-
tha) flowerings, over-turned quartz and silcrete flakes and shards, watched
the flight of pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) overhead, touched the lerps
of Blackwood trees (Acacia melanoxylon), watched bull ants (Myrmecia
spp.) emerge industriously, heard the wind in our hair whilst listening to
bird song, and looked out upon intangible visual connectivities of past
ancestral exploits and journeys now implicit in the physicality of place. It
has not been about genius loci. Nor has it been about the ‘art’ of designing.
It has been about ‘reading’ and appreciating what needs to be respected
from the ravages of Western land use activities (Benterrak et al. 1996).
Such is different from the inquiry framework in Chaps. 3–5, within
this book, that thematically unpacked the narratives of the Western
District landscape of Victoria. The framework offered and tested in these
chapters provides a recipe in understanding the key weft threads of this
landscape. It is not a substitute for Country and Aboriginal land ethic
(Rose 1988, 1996), but both hold interesting parallels and comparabili-
ties in the way that human values are recognised. Analogous themes
reside in both, but they are cast in different modes of self and cultural
baggage.
Genius loci is thus a concept; a realm impossible for us to consciously
design and create. Its antecedents and flavours hold the collision of
human thought and action within nature and the legacy of temporality.
For me, to talk of the meaning of a place as possessing 30,000 years of
history, and that such is still in its continuum, is a ‘foreign country’
8 Sense of Place Mappings 405
(Lowenthal 1985) to European sensibilities that invaded this unceded

sovereignty. It is not mine, by ancestry, to talk of. There is a reciprocity in
this relationship that needs to be understood. As echoed by Cronon
(1996, 22):
The material nature we inhabit and the ideal nature we carry in our heads
exist always in complex relationship with each other, and we will mis-
understand both ourselves and the world if we fail to explore that relation-
ship in all its rich and contradictory complexity.
Notwithstanding these intellectual and philosophical complexities, the

framework explained and tested in these chapters, mapped against two
cultures and lands occupancies, clearly demonstrates that key values and
strengths can be qualitatively discerned and weighted as to intensity and
presence. In the academic realm, such a framework offers replicability,
veracity, and applicability, but in the Aboriginal world, it is irrelevant
because it is, always is, always has been, always will be, and belies read-
ings, listenings, and respecting the voices of Country (Jones 2021).
Accordingly, this book holds forth a possible roadmap to appraise the
cultural values and narratives implicit in our landscapes—in our ‘cultural
landscapes’. A roadmap to appreciate and respect the fractured skin of
this body and its infractions as it navigates age, weathering, and self, irre-
spective of scale and gender and species.
If you feel happy in place, then you are home, and recognise that you
need to look after its welfare. If place makes you unsettled, or you ‘read’
negative signs, then a place’s genius is clearly telling you something.
Not reading is cultural blindness; reading is cultural literacy.
* * *
30th January 1951.

One summer, an unfamiliar lady invaded my library kingdom. Grandfather
had produced several battered cardboard boxes filled with old diaries, journals,
account ledgers, fading letters, tattered family photographs, and piles of scrolled
papers and plans from the hidden depths of his bookshelves and she was inquisi-
406 D. S. Jones
tively reading every detail. Wary, I monitored her progress from a deep leather
settee, while trying to engross myself in the adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and
The Magic Pudding (Lindsay 1924). Occasionally she broke her reading and
transcribed paragraphs and statistics into leather-bound notebooks, wandered
up to and studied the map over the fireplace, or looked out into the distant
sunlit paddocks.
In the evenings she would sit out on the verandah with grandfather sipping
sherry and profusely scribbling notes from his utterances. They would talk about
his old friends, the landscape he remembered, the buildings and gardens that he
built and planted, his recollections of Scotland, and the stories he recalled of the
plains. The latter I would always lap up as pleasurable distractions to my bois-
terous pet magpie or the proddings of my grandmother to have another biscuit.
Grandfather eventually confided to me that the ‘intruder’ was writing a book
about the pioneers and history of the District but that he doubted it would be
published because he perceived there was no history here on the plains.
* * *
References
Jones, DS (ed.) (2021), Learning Country in Landscape Architecture Indigenous
Knowledge Systems, Respect and Appreciation. London, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lindsay, N (1924), The Magic Pudding: Being the Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum
and his Friends Bill Barnacle & Sam Sawnoff. Sydney, NSW: Cornstalk
Publishing Co.
University Press.
8 Sense of Place Mappings 407

Publishing.
Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation (WTOAC) (2020),
Corporation.
Plant and Animal Nomenclature Glossary
Plants
A.
‘Acacia Hedge’ Acacia paradoxa
Acacia spp.
Acanthus Acanthus mollis
Aleppo Pine Pinus halepensis
Allocasuarina spp.
‘Anchistiria’ Themeda triandra
Angel’s Trumpet Datura arborea
Apple Tree Malus sylvestris
Ash Fraxinus spp.
Atlas Cedar Cedrus atlantica
Austral Bluebell Wahlenbergia gracilis
Austral Bracken Pteridium esculentum
Austral Hollyhock Lavatera plebeia
Austral Seablite Suaeda australis
Austral Stork’s Bill Pelargonium australe
Austrian Pine Pinus austriaca
B.
Barley Hordeum spp.
Bathurst Burr Xanthium spinosum
(continued)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7
410 Plant and Animal Nomenclature Glossary
(continued)
Bay Tree Laurus nobilus

Bearded Glasswort Sarcocornia quinqueflora spp.
quinqueflora
Beauty-Bush Kolkwitzia amabilis
Beech Fagus spp.
Bhutan Cypress Cupressus torulosa
Bhutan Pine Pinus excelsa
Birch Betula spp.
Black Wattle Acacia mearnsii
‘Black-Boys’ Xanthorrhoea australis
Blackberry Rubus spp.
Blackwood Acacia melanoxylon
Blown Grass Agrostis avenacea
‘Blue Devil’ Eryngium ovinum
Blue Gum Eucalyptus globulus
Blue Heron’s Bill Erodium crinitum
Bluebells Sollya heterophylla
Blushing Bindweed Convolvulus erubescens
Brachycome spp.
Brown Stringybark Eucalyptus baxteri
Buddleia Buddleia spp.
Bulbine Lily Bulbine bulbosa
Bunya Bunya Araucaria bidwillii
Burr Medic Lotus spp.
Bushy Needlewood Hakea sericea
C.
Cabbage Tree Cordyline australis
Californian Redwood Sequoia sempervirens
Callistemon spp.
Camellia Camellia spp.
Canary Island Pine Pinus canariensis
Cape Plumbago Plumbago auriculata
Carob Bean Ceratonia siliqua
Casuarina spp. Casuarina or Allocasuarina spp.
‘Chalicum’ Eryngium ovinum
Cherry Ballart Exocarpos cupressiformis
‘Cherry Tree’ Exocarpos cupressiformis
Chestnut Castanea sativa
Chinese Elm Ulmus parvifolia
Chinese Hawthorn Photinia serrulata
Chinese Weeping Cypress Cupressus funebris
Chocolate Lily Arthropodium strictum
Chrysanthemums Chrysanthemum spp.
Common Correa Correa reflexa
(continued)
Plant and Animal Nomenclature Glossary 411
(continued)
Common Heath Epacris impressa

Common Nardoo Marsilea drummondii
Common Reed Phragmites australis
Common Sneezeweed Centipeda cunninghamii
Common Tree Everlasting Ozothamnus ferrugineus
Coquito Palm Jubaea spectabilis
Cork Oak Quercus suber
Corsican Pine Pinus nigra var. maritima
Coulteri Pine Pinus coulteri
Crab Apple Malus spp.
Crane’s Bill Geranium potentilloides
Cumbungi Typha domingensis
Cyperus spp.
D.
Daffodils Narcissus spp.
Dahlias Dahlia spp.
Deodar Cedar Cedrus deodara
‘Dracean’ Palm Cordyline stricta
Drooping Sheoak Allocasuarina verticillata
Dwarf Grass-wrack Zostera muelleri
E.
Early Black Wattle Acacia decurrens
Early Nancy Wurmbea dioica
English Box Buxus sempervirens
English Elm Ulmus procera
English Holly Ilex aquifolium
English Ivy Hedera helix
English Oak Quercus robur
English Yew Taxus baccata
Euonymus Euonymus fortunei
F.
Feather Spear-Grass Stipa elegantissima
Feathertails Ptilotus macrocephalus
Fig Tree Ficus spp.
Flowering Cherry Prunus spp.
Fringe-Lilies Thysanotus spp.
G.
Gleditsia Gleditsia spp.
Golden Wattle Acacia pycnantha
Goodenia spp.
Gorse Ulex europaeus
Grass Lilies Caesia spp.
Grass-Tree Xanthorrhoea australis
(continued)
(continued)
Gray Copperburr Sclerolaena diacantha
Greenhood Orchids Pterostylis spp.
Grevillea spp.
H.
Hakea spp.
Hawthorns Crataegus spp.
Hedge Wattle Acacia paradoxa
Helichrysum spp. Helichrysum or Ozothamnus spp.
Himalayan Spruce Picea smithiana
Holm Oak Quercus ilex
‘Honeysuckle’ Banksia marginata
Hoop Pine Araucaria cunninghamii
Hyacinths Hyacinth spp.
I.
‘Inland Noonflower’ Carpobrotus modestus
Inland Pigface Carpobrotus modestus
Irish Yew Taxus baccata ‘Fastigiata’
Italian Cypress Cupressus sempervirens
J.
Jessamines Cestrum spp.
Jonquils Narcissus spp.
K.
Kangaroo Apple Solanum laciniatum
Kangaroo Grass Themeda triandra
‘Kangaroo Thorn’ Acacia paradoxa
Kurrajong Brachychiton populneus
L.
Late Black Wattle Acacia mearnsii
Laurustinus Viburnum tinus
Lawson Cypress Chamaecyparis lawsoniana
Lightwood Acacia implexa
‘Lightwood’ Acacia melanoxylon
Lilly-Pilly Acmena smithii
Lily-of-the-Valley Pieris spp.
Lucerne Medicago spp.
M.
Magenta Stork’s-Bill Pelargonium rodneyanum
Magnolia Magnolia spp.
Manna Gum Eucalyptus viminalis
Maple Acer spp.
Maritime Pine Pinus pinaster
(continued)
(continued)
Marsh Club-Rush Bolboschoenus medianus

‘Mesembryantheum’ Carpobrotus spp.
Messmate Eucalyptus obliqua
Milkmaids Burchardia umbellata
Monkey Puzzle Tree Araucaria araucana
Monterey Pine Pinus radiata
Moreton Bay Fig Araucaria cunninghamii
Mulberry Tree Morus spp.
Muntries Kunzea pomifera
Murnong Microseris lanceolata
Murray Pine Callitris columellaris
N.
‘Narrow-Leafed Gum’ Eucalyptus radiata
‘Native Apple’ Solanum laciniatum
Native Bread Polyporus mylittae
Native Brush Cherry Syzygium australe
‘Native Cherry’ Exocarpos cupressiformis
Native Convolvulus Convolvulus erubescens
‘Native Geranium’ Geranium potentilloides
‘Native Hickory’ Acacia melanoxylon
Native Raspberry Rubus parvifolius
New Caledonia Pine Araucaria rulei
Norfolk Island Hibiscus Lagunaria patersonia
Norfolk Island Pine Araucaria heterophylla
‘Nurt’ Kunzea pomifera
O.
‘Oak’ Exocarpos cupressiformis
Oats Avea spp.
Olive Tree Olea europaea
Onion Grass Romulea spp.
Oriental Plane Platanus orientalis
Osage Orange Maclura pomifera
P.
Pale Vanilla Lily Arthropodium milleflorum
Passion Flower Passiflora spp.
Pepper Tree Schinus molle
Pineapple Guava Feijoa sellowiana
Pink Bindweed Convolvulus erubescens
‘Pinus Insignis’ Pinus radiata
Pondweeds Potamogeton spp.
Portuguese Laurel Prunus lusitanica
Potato Orchid Gastrodia sesamoides
Prickly Box Bursaria spinosa
(continued)
(continued)
Prickly Moses Acacia mearnsii

Prickly Tea-Tree Leptospermum continentale
Prunus Prunus spp.
Purple Coral Pea Hardenbergia violacea
Purple Donkey-orchid Diuris punctata
‘Purple Hardenbergia’ Hardenbergia violacea
Purple Loosestrife Lythrum salicaria
Pussy Tails Ptilotus spathulatus
Q.
Queensland Kauri Agathis robusta
R.
Ranunculus Ranunculus spp.
Rape Brassica spp.
‘Red Gum’ Eucalyptus camaldulensis
Red-Flowering Gum Eucalyptus ficifolia
Rhododendron Rhododendron spp.
River Mint Mentha australis
River Red Gum Eucalyptus camaldulensis
Royal Pawlownia Pawlownia tomentosa
Running Postman Kennedia prostrata
Rye Grass Secale cerale
S.
‘Scarlet Kennedia’ Kennedia prostrata
Scirpus sp.
Scotch Thistle Carduus lanceolatus
Sea Tassel Ruppia spp.
‘Sheoak’ Allocasuarina verticillata
Short-haired Plume Grass Dichelachne micrantha
‘Silk Grass’ Vulpia bromoides
Silky Hakea Hakea sericea
Silky Oak Grevillea hilliana
Silver Banksia Banksia marginata
‘Silver Grass’ Vulpia bromoides
Silver Tussock Poa sieberiana var. sieberiana
Slender Knotweed Persicaria decipiens
Slender Thistle Carduus tenuiflorus
Small-Leaved Bramble Rubus parvifolius
Small-Leaved Clematis Clematis microphylla
South African Boxthorn Lycium ferocissimum
South African Cape Weed Arctotheca calendula
Sow Thistle Sonchus olearaceus
Spear Grass Stipa spp.
Spear Thistle Carduus lanceolatus
(continued)
(continued)
Spiky Blue Devil Eryngium ovinum
Spiny-Headed Mat-rush Lomandra longifolia
Squirrel-Tailed Fescue Vulpia bromiodes
Stone Pine Pinus pinea
Subterranean Clover Trifolium subterraneum
Sugar Gum Eucalyptus cladocalyx
Sugar Pine Pinus lambertina
Swamp Gum Eucalyptus ovata
Swamp Lily Ottelia ovalifolia
Swamp Wallaby Grass Amphibromus spp.
Sweet Briar Rosa rubiginosa
Sweet Bursaria Bursaria spinosa
Sword-Sedge Lepidosperma spp.
T.
Tall Saw-Sedge Gahnia clarkei
Tangled Lignum Muehlenbeckia sphacelata
Tarata Pittosporum eugenioides
Thyme Thymus vulgaris
Tree Everlasting Ozothamnus ferrugineus
Tree of Heaven Ailanthus altissima
Tree Violet Hymenathera dentata
‘Trefoil Burr’ Lotus spp.
Tufted Bluebell Wahlenbergia communis
Tussock Grass Poa labillardieri
Tussock Grasses Poa spp.
V.
Variable Groundsel Senecio lautus
Variegated Thistle Carduus marianus
Velvet Tussock Grass Poa morrisii
Verbena Stachytarpheta mutabilis
Viburnum Viburnum spp.
W.
Wall-Flower Cheiranthus spp.
Wallaby Grass Danthonia penicillata
Wallaby Grasses Danthonia spp.
Walnut Tree Juglans spp.
Water-Mats Lepilaena spp.
Water-Milfoils Myriophyllum spp.
Water-Ribbon Triglochin procera
Weeping Grass Microlaena stipoides
Weeping Willow Salix babylonica
Wellingtonia Sequoiadendron giganteum
Western Yellow Pine Pinus ponderosa
(continued)
(continued)
Wheat Triticum spp.

White Clover Trifolium repens
White Elderberry Sambucus gaudichaudiana
‘White Gum’ Eucalyptus viminalis
Widgeon Grass Ruppia spp.
‘Wild Geranium’ Geranium domingensis
‘Wild Raspberry’ Sambucus gaudichaudiana
‘Wild Yam’ Microseris lanceolata
Windmill Grass Chloris truncata
Wisteria Wisteria spp.
Woolly Tea-Tree Leptospermum lanigerum
Wurmbea spp.
X.
‘Xanthrasia’ Xanthorrhoea australis
Y.
Yellow Everlasting Ozothamnus spp.
Yorkshire Fog Holcus lanatus
Animals
Invertebrates
Cicadas
Crickets
Mosquitos
Sickle-Clawed Yabby Engeanus sp.
Spiny Crayfish Eustacus bispinosus
Witchetty Grubs
Fish
Australian Smelt Retropinna semoni

Blackfish Gadopsis marmoratus
Brown Trout Salmo trutta
‘Colonial Trout’ Salmo gairdneri
Common Galaxia Galaxias maculatus
Crucian Carp Cyprinus carpio
Dwarf Galaxia Galaxiella pusilla
(continued)
(continued)
English Perch Perca fluviatilis

English Tench Tinca tinca
Freshwater Herrings Pomatolosa richmondia
Goldfish Carassius auratus
Graylings Prototrocles maraena
Gudgeon Hypseleotris sp.
Hardyheads Atherinosoma microstoma
Lamprey Eels Mordacia mordax
Mosquito Fish Gambusa affinis
Murray Cod Maccullochella peeli
Mountain Galaxia Galaxias olidus
‘Perch Cod’ Maccullochella peeli
Rainbow Trout Salmo gairdneri
Redfin Perca fluviatilis
Salmon Trout Onocorhynchus tshawytscha
‘Serpent’ Anguilla australis
Short-finned Eel Anguilla australis
Reptiles
Blue-Tongue Lizard Tiliqua occipitalis

Brown Snake Pseudonaja nuchalis
‘Carpet Snake’ Notechis scutatus
Shingle-Backed Lizard Trachydosaurus rugosus
Tiger Snake Notechis scutatus
White-Lipped Snake Drysdalia coronoides
Birds
A.
Australasian Brown Bittern Botaurus poiciloptilus
Australian Bustard Ardeotis australis
Australian Coot Fulica atra
Australian Kestrel Falco cenchroides
Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen
Australian Magpie-Lark Grallina cyanoleuca
Australian Pelican Pelecanus conspicillatus
‘Australian’ Pipit Anthus novaeseelandiae
Australian Raven Corvus coronoides
Australian Shelduck Tadorna tadornoides
Australian Skylark Mirafra javanica
Australian Snipe Gallinago hardwickii
(continued)
(continued)
B.
Banded Stilt Cladorhynchus leucocephalus
‘Banksian Cockatoo’ Calyptorhynchus magnificus
Barn Owl Tyto alba
Bell Miner Manorina melanophrys
Blackbird Turdus merula
‘Black Cockatoo’ Calyptorhynchus magnificus
Black Duck Anas superciliosa
Black Fan-Tailed Flycatcher Rhipidura rufifrons
Black Jay Corcorax melanorhamphus
Black Swan Cygnus atratus
Black-Winged Stilt Himantopus himantopus
‘Blue Bill’ Oxyura australis
‘Blue Crane’ Grus rubicundus
‘Blue Crane’ Ardea novaehollandiae
Blue Mountain Parrot Trichoglossus haematodus
Blue-Billed Duck Oxyura australis
Blue-Headed Wren Malurus cyaneus
Boobook Owl Ninox novaeseelandiae
Brolga Grus rubicundus
Bronzewing Phaps chalcoptera
‘Brown Bittern’ Botaurus poiciloptilus
Brown Quail Coturnix ypsilophorus
‘Bushman’s Clock’ Dacelo gigas
Bustard Ardeotis australis
C.
California Quail Lophortyx californicus
Cape Barron Geese Cereopsis novaehollandiae
Chestnut Teal Anas castanea
‘Chinese Quail’ Coturnix chinensis
Collared Sparrowhawk Accipiter cirrhocephalus
Common Blackbird Turdus mercula
Common Bronzewing Phaps chalcoptera
Common Myna Acridotheres tristis
Common Pheasant Phasianus colchicus
Common Skylark Alauda arvensis
Common Starling Sturnus vulgaris
Coot Fulica atra
Corella Cacatua tenuirostris
Cormorant Phalacrocorax spp.
Crakes Pozana spp.
Crow Corvus coronoides
Curlew Sandpiper Calidris ferruginea
(continued)
(continued)
D.
Domestic Pigeon Columba livia
Double-Banded Dotterel Charadrius bicinctus
Dusky Moorhen Gallinula tenebrosa
E.
‘Eagle-Hawk’ Aquila audax
Eastern Curlew Numenius madagascariensis
Emu Dromaius novaehollandiae
English Blackbird Turdus merula
English Skylark Alauda arvensis
Eurasian Coot Fulica atra
Eurasian Tree Sparrow Passer montanus
European Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis
European Greenfinch Carduelis chloris
European House Sparrow Passer domesticus
European Thrush Turdus philomelos
F.
‘Farmers’ Friend’ Threskiornis spinicollis
Fork-Tailed Swift Apus pacificus
Freckled Duck Stictonetta naevosa
G.
Galah Cacatua roseicapilla
Great Crested Grebe Podiceps cristatus
Great Egret Egretta alba
Green Parroquet Glossopsitta porphyrocephala
Greenshank Tringa nebularia
H.
Hardhead Aytha australis
Herons Ardea spp.
Hoary-Headed Grebe Poliocephalus poliocephalus
House Sparrow Passer domesticus
I.
Ibis Threskiornis spp.
Indian Dove Streptopelia chinensis
‘Indian Minah’ Acridotheres tristis
Indian Myna Acridotheres tristis
Indian Peacock Pavo cristatus
J.
Jacky Winter Microeca leucophaea
Japanese Snipe Gallinago hardwickii
(continued)
(continued)
K.
Kestrel Falco cenchroides
King Quail Coturnix chinensis
Kookaburra Dacelo gigas
L.
‘Latham’s Snipe’ Gallinago hardwickii
‘Laughing Jackass’ Dacelo gigas
Laughing Kookaburra Dacelo gigas
Little Cormorant Phalacrocorax melanoleucos
‘Linnet’ Lichenostomus flavicollis
Long-Billed Corella Cacatua tenuirostris
M.
Marsh Harrier Circus aeruginosus
Masked Lapwing Vanellus miles
Masked Plover Vanellus miles
Miner Bird Manorina melanocephala
Mopoke Ninox novaeseelandiae
‘Mopoke’ Podargus strigoides
‘Morepork’ Ninox novaeseelandiae
Mountain Duck Tadorna tadornoides
Mute Swan Cygnus olor
N.
Nankeen Kestrel Falco cenchroides
‘Native Companion’ Grus rubicundus
‘Native Turkey’ Ardeotis australis
Noisy Miner Manorina melanocephala
P.
Pacific Black Duck Anas superciliosa
Painted Snipe Rostratula benghalensis
Pallid Cuckoo Cuculus pallidus
Peacock Pavo cristatus
Pectoral Sandpiper Calidris melanotos
Pied Cormorant Phalacrocorax melanoleucos
Plains Turkey Ardeotis australis
Plains Wanderer Pedionomus torquatus
Powerful Owl Ninox strenua
Purple Swamphen Porhyrio porphyrio
Q.
‘Quail Hawk’ Circus aeruginosus
Quails Coturnix spp.
(continued)
(continued)
R.
Rails Rallus spp.
Rainbow Lorikeet Trichoglossus haematodus
Raven Corvus coronoides
‘Red-crest’ Cacatua roseicapilla
Red-Necked Stint Calidris ruficollis
Red-Tailed Black Cockatoo Calyptorhynchus magnificus
Richard’s Pipit Anthus novaeseelandiae
Ring-Necked Pheasant Phasianus colchicus
‘Rosella’ Platycercus eximius
S.
Sacred White Ibis Threskiornis aethiopica
Seagull Larus novaehollandiae
Sharp-Tailed Sandpiper Calidris acuminata
‘Shepherd’s Companion’ Rhipidura leucophrys
Silver Gull Larus novaehollandiae
Singing Bushlark Mirafra javanica
Singing Honeyeater Lichenostomus virescens
Skylark Alaudus arvensis
‘Soldier Bird’ Manorina melanocephala
Song Thrush Turdus philomelos
‘Sparrow-Hamk’ Accipiter cirrhocephalus
‘Speckled Duck’ Stictonetta naevosa
Spine-Tailed Swift Hirundapus caudacutus
Spoonbills Phalatea spp.
Spotted Turtledove Streptopelia chinenesis
‘Spur-Winged Plover’ Charadrius bicinctus
Straw-necked Ibis Threskiornis spinicollis
Stubble Quail Coturnix pectoralis
Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo Cacatua galerita
Superb Blue Wren Malurus cyaneus
Swamp Hen Porphyrio porphyrio
Swamp Quail Coturnix ypsilophorus
Swamp Hawk Circus aeruginosus
T.
Tawny Frogmouth Podargus strigoides
Tawny-Crowned Honeyeater Phylidonyris melanops
‘Turkey-Quail’ Pedionumus torquatus
W.
‘Weather-Bird’ Cuculus pallidus
Wedge-Tailed Eagle Aquila audax
Whiskered Tern Chlidonias hybrida
Whistling Kite Haliastur sphenurus
(continued)
(continued)
‘Whistling Eagle-Hawk’ Haliastur sphenurus

‘White Cockatoo’ Cacatua tenuirostris
‘White Cockatoo’ Cacatua galerita
White Crane Egretta alba
White Ibis Threskiornis molucca
White Mute Swan Cygnus olor
White Owl Tyto alba
White-Backed Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen
White-Faced Heron Ardea novaehollandiae
White-Eyed Duck Aythya australis
White-Fronted Chat Epithianura albifrons
White-Winged Chough Corcorax melanorhamphus
‘Wild Duck’ Anas superciliosa
‘Wild Plains Turkey’ Ardeotis australis
Willie Wagtail Rhipidura leucophrys
Wood Duck Chenonetta jubata
Y.
Yellow-Rumped Thornbill Acanthiza chrysoohoa
Yellow-Throated Honeyeater Lichenostomus flavicollis
Mammals
A.
Australian Fur Seal Arctocephalus pusillus
B.
Bilby Thlacomys lagotis
Bridled Nailtail Onychogalea fraenata
Brown Bandicoot Isoodon obesulus
Brown Hare Lepus capensis
Brush-Tailed Phascogale Phascogale tapoatafa
Brushtail Possum Trichosurus vulpecula
C.
Cattle Bos taurus
D.
‘Dasyure’ Dasyurus maculatus & D. viverrinus
Dingo Canis familiaris dingo
Dog Canis familiaris
Dunnarts Sminthopsis spp.
(continued)
(continued)
E.
Eastern Barred Bandicoot Perameles gunnii
Eastern Grey Kangaroo Macropus giganteus
Eastern Quoll Dasyurus viverrinus
Echidna Tachyglossus aculeatus
European Rabbit Orcyctolagus cuniculus
F.
Fat-Tailed Dunnart Sminthopsis crassicaudata
Feathertail Glider Acrobates pygmaeus
Flying Mouse Acrobates pygmaeus
‘Flying Squirrel’ Phascogale tapoatafa
Fox Vulpes vulpes
G.
‘Grey Kangaroo’ Macropus giganteus
H.
Horse Equus caballus
House Mouse Mus musculus
K.
Kangaroo Rat Rattus fuscipes
Koala Phascolarctos cinereus
L.
Long-Nosed Bandicoot Perameles nasuta
N.
‘Native Bear’ Phascolarctos cinereus
‘Native Cat’ Dasyurus viverrinus
P.
Platypus Ornithorhynchus anatinus
‘Porcupine’ Tachyglossus aculeatus
R.
Rabbit-Eared Tree-rat Conilurus albipes
Red Deer Cervus elaphus
Red Kangaroo Macropus rufus
Red-Bellied Pademelon Thylogale billardierii
Red-Necked Wallaby Macropus rufogriseus
Ring-Tailed Bettong Bettongiua penicillata
Ring-Tailed Possum Pseudocheirus peregrinus
S.
Sheep Ovies aries
‘Spotted Quoll’ Dasyurus maculatus
(continued)
(continued)
Sugar Glider Petaurus breviceps

Swamp Rat Rattus lutreolus
Swamp Wallaby Wallabia bicolor
T.
Tiger Quoll Dasyurus maculatus
Toolache Macropus greyi
Tuan Phascogale tapoatafa
W.
Water Rat Hydromys chrysogaster
‘Wild Dog’ Canis familiaris dingo
Wombat Vombatus vombatus
Y.
Yaakar Thylacomys lagotis?
Notes:
sp. species
spp. more than one species
‘....’ colloquial name
Sources: Bennett (1982); Clark (1990a); Costermans (1981); Dawson (1881); Ewart
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Place Names Index1
A Barigar, 84
Adelaide, 181, 189, 225, 235, 294 Barng, 137, 138
Allansford, 312 Barnk, 137, 138
Ararat, 181, 190, 227, 281, 286, 291 Baronga, 85, 89, 91, 100
Arrandoovong Creek, 123 Barrabool Hills, 226, 278
Australia Felix, 10, 50–56, 155, 170, Barrh, 85
172, 178, 181, 183, 383 Basin Banks, 198, 199, 245, 301,
Avebury, 60, 136 316, 323
Beaufort, 312
Beeac, 285
B Belfast, 167, 181, 184, 281
Baangal Parish, 219, 227, 317, 321 Bessiebelle, 99, 217, 315, 318–320
Bainenong, 123 Billawin, 92
Ballaarat, 188, 191 Billimin, 84
Ballangeich, 229 Billimina, 92
Ballarat, 244, 292, 339 Birregurra Parish, 162, 167
Balmoral, 167, 300 Birregurra, 162, 167
Banyenong, 85 The Black Range, 92, 130
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7
478 Place Names Index
Black Swamp, 75, 78, 89, 119, 205 The Camp of the Emu’s Foot, 92
Black’s Hill, 230 Cape Otway, 85
Blackwood Creek, 315 Caramut Parish, 297
Boloke, 75, 85, 89, 95, 98, 117, 121, Caramut, 89, 119, 165, 189, 195,
122, 136 209, 211, 218, 297, 316
Boomerang Ridge, 180 Carngham Parish, 166, 168, 184,
Booruc, 85, 116 309, 331, 339
Boram Boram, 196 Casterton, 184, 190, 280, 291,
Borriyalloak Parish, 317 296, 298
Branxholme, 280 The Cave of the Serpents, 92, 115,
Broken Creek, 317 133, 134, 136
Brown’s Waterholes, 292, 317, 328 Ceres, 91
Bryan’s Creek, 194 Challicum Creek, 134, 219
Buckinghamshire, 61 Challicum, 202, 203, 219,
Buckley’s Swamp, 95 317, 324
Buffalo Ranges, 287 Chatham’s Lines, 90
Bukkar whuurong, 78 Cobrico, 197
Bullen meri, 78 Colac Botanic Gardens, 301
Bullen Merri, 198, 323 Colac forest, 273
Buninyong, 181 Colac, 162, 174, 226, 230, 278,
Bunjil’s Cave, 92, 115, 133 281, 295, 312, 318,
Buntingdale, 192, 203, 204 324, 339
Burrong, 92 Coleraine, 190, 280, 291, 295,
Burrumbeep Parish, 80, 220 298, 305, 311, 315, 328,
Burumbeep, 80 345, 349
Burumbolak, 85 Condah Parish, 162
Bush Creek, 298, 328, 345 Condah Swamp, 89, 205, 319
Byaduk Parish, 312 Condah, 182, 311, 319
Byaduk, 312 Connewarren Lagoon, 86
Convincing Ground, 194
Cor.ramut, 89, 90, 119, 123
C Coraing, 122, 128
Calvert Lough, 230 The Craigs, 92, 135
Campaspe River, 182 Cressy, 180, 191, 292, 299, 316
Camperdown Botanic Gardens, 323 Cro.cup.per ije, 84, 85, 89, 90, 95,
Camperdown, 181, 188, 196, 218, 117, 122, 126, 127
245, 278, 297, 299, 301, 316, Croajingolong, 184
323, 325 Curdies River valley, 230, 319
Place Names Index 479
D Fighting Hills, 194

Darlington, 137, 168, 191, 299 First River, 181
Darlot’s creek, 89, 285 Flat-top Hill, 116
Deen maar, 135 Framlingham Protectorate Reserve, 193
Derrinallum, 213, 283, 286 Framlingham, 193, 284
Devil’s peak, 78 Frenchman’s Inn, 180, 191, 213
Digby, 98, 181, 222 Fyansford, 180
Dogs Rocks, 91
Doutagalla, 286
Dundas Ranges, 123, 305 G
Dunkeld, 167, 190, 191, 219, 291, Gar, 84
299, 300 Gariwerd, 84, 92, 100, 109, 133,
Duwil, 85, 89, 90, 117, 121, 122 173, 182, 219, 287, 291, 317,
Dyurnera, 138 327, 339
Geelong, 85, 91, 166, 167, 174,
180, 181, 183, 190, 229, 235,
E 278, 293, 311, 339
Eaglemont, 346 Gellibrand, 136, 323
Echuca, 291 Gilambidj, 89, 91
Edinburgh, 96, 293 Glenaber 1, 92, 136
Elephant Bridge, 191 Glenaber 2, 92, 136
Ellerslie, 300, 328 Glenelg River, 167, 190
Emu Creek, 76, 85, 164, 172, 191, Glenisla Shelter, 92
193, 195, 210, 218, 219, 230, Glenorchy, 287
286, 316, 317 Gnarkeet Chain of Ponds, 308, 317
England, 14, 51, 159, 170, 171, Gnarpurt, 209, 210, 235, 309, 311,
183, 203, 207, 225, 239, 251, 317, 321
302, 308, 312, 349, 351, 403 Gnotukk, 78
Ercildoune Peak, 321, 323, 324, Gnurad, 75, 85, 89–91
326, 339, 349 The Grampians, 84, 92, 109, 133,
Eumeralla Parish, 123, 190, 203, 287, 305
228, 240 Grampian Mountains, 206
Eumeralla River, 194, 249 Grange Burn, 100, 168, 181, 189,
Ewen’s Hill, 197 190, 205, 230, 315, 318
Gray’s Creek, 91
Great Dividing Range, 242
F Gringegalgona Parish, 195, 210,
Fern Tree Gully, 245 300, 305, 310, 322, 325, 347
Fiery Creek, 134, 138, 190, 191, Guichen Bay, 181, 191
219, 230 Guru, 134
H Koang, 293
Hamilton botanic gardens, 298 Kolora swamp, 224, 319
Hamilton, 167, 180, 189, 190, 278, Kolora, 175, 283, 312
282, 286, 291, 292, 294, 297, Konda, 89, 138
298, 312, 315, 320 Konong Wootong Creek, 194
Haunted Gully, 196 Konong Wootong Parish, 194
Hawkesdale, 162, 190, 298 Koort-koort-nong Parish, 212,
Henty Creek, 300 226, 323
Hexham, 167, 189, 195, 209, 218, Koroit, 78, 190, 194, 291, 301
278, 292, 297, 316 Koroite Creek, 190
Heytesbury forest, 280 Koroite valley, 98
Heywood, 167 Kuruc-a-ruc Creek, 308
Hochkirch, 280 Kuurnkolak, 122, 127
Homerton, 122
Hopkins River Falls, 122, 198, 301
Hopkins River, 85, 86, 91, 100, 122, L
162, 189, 286, 295, 316, Lady Julia Percy Island, 135
327, 339 Lake Albacutya, 134
Hotspur, 167 Lake Bolac, 89, 98, 117, 136, 161,
162, 181, 183, 190, 191, 299
Lake Boloke, 75, 85, 89, 95, 98, 117,
I 121, 122, 136
Italy, 30, 242, 247 Lake Bullen Merri, 198, 323
Lake Buloke, 85, 123
Lake Buninjon, 83, 84, 138
J Lake Burrumbeet, 319
Jallukar, 91 Lake Colac, 162, 174, 226, 230,
Janang-en-yawiwe, 92 295, 324, 339
Lake Colongulac, 122, 196, 235
Lake Condah Mission, 80
K Lake Condah Station, 193
Kangatong Parish, 190, 217, 315 Lake Condah, 63, 89, 99, 109, 117,
Karngun Parish, 167 138, 193, 326
Keilambete, 89, 91, 192, 195, 202, Lake Connewarren, 86
209, 224, 226, 235, 326 Lake Corangamite, 122, 162,
Kiewa Valley, 184 230, 319
Killarney, 319 Lake Gnarpurt, 235, 317
Kilnoorat, 161, 189, 311 Lake Gnotuk, 196, 198
Knorart, 222 Lake Gorrie, 99, 205
Lake Hindmarsh, 134 May.jow.renoke, 122, 127

Lake Keilambete Camp, 192 Melbourne, 166, 225, 293, 318,
Lake Lake Wollard Parish, 167 329, 333
Lake Learmonth, 319 Merri River, 190
Lake Linlithgow, 167 The Milky Way, 66, 137, 138
Lake Logan, 317 Minjaar, 137
Lake McLaren, 49 Minjah Parish, 212, 217, 240, 304,
Lake Modewarre, 167 305, 315
Lake Purrumbete, 162, 218, 235, Mirræwuæ, 75, 78, 89, 95, 119, 123
323, 339 Modeware Parish, 319
Lake Repose, 182 Mokepilly, 134
Lake Terang Camp, 192 Mondilibi Hill, 116
Lake Terang, 210 Mondilibi, 85
Lake Tooliorook, 308, 317 Moorabool River, 226
Lake Wongan, 92, 134, 135 Moorabool valley, 226
Langi Ghiran Site, 133 Mornington Peninsula, 6
Larneejeering, 92 Mortlake, 162, 167, 178, 181, 189,
Lehuura, 76, 77 213, 281, 282, 297, 298, 311,
Leigh River, 160, 235 312, 319
Lett’s Ford, 300 Mortom, 78
Lismore Creek, 210 Mount Abrupt, 127, 182, 197
Lismore, 191, 292, 299, 321, 322, Mount Ararat, 181, 190, 227, 281, 291
324, 327 Mount Buninyong, 181
London, 245 Mount Burrumbeep, 80, 220
Lower Eumeralla Swamp, 319 Mount Camel, 100
Lower Wannon Falls, 300 Mount Cole, 165, 166, 222,
Lubra Creek, 195 291, 320
Lurtpii, 78, 138 Mount Difficult, 84
Mount Dryden, 244, 246
Mount Eccles, 99, 193, 194, 249,
M 280, 327
Macarthur, 162, 190, 298 Mount Elephant, 77, 197, 204, 212,
Macarthur Plains, 331 219, 222, 223, 246, 250, 308,
MacArthur’s Hill, 221 309, 317, 321, 324
Mackinnon’s Hill, 197 Mount Emu, 220, 223, 317
Mahwallock Parish, 229 Mount Emu Creek, 76, 85, 164,
Mallee, 85, 91, 106, 227, 295 172, 191, 193, 195, 210, 218,
Marida Yallock Parish, 165, 324, 346 219, 230, 286, 292, 316, 317,
Maroona, 85 327, 339
Mount Fyans, 283, 295, 304, Murdadjoog, 127

306, 321 Murderer’s Valley, 195
Mount Gambier, 184, 318 Murdering Flat, 194
Mount Gellibrand, 323 Murdering Gully, 193
Mount Hamilton, 49, 134 Murroa, 95, 222
Mount Kayang, 293 Murtoa, 85
Mount Koang, 316 Muston’s Creek, 90, 189, 194, 292, 316
Mount Langi Ghiran, 92, 222 Myamyn forest, 182
Mount Leura, 76, 297, 301, 316, 323
Mount Meningoort, 221, 306, 316
Mount Misery, 235 N
Mount Napier, 98, 167, 182, 190, Naples, 124
197, 217, 221, 222, 237, 298, Nareeb nareeb Parish, 136, 299
319, 327 Naringal, 195, 280, 299
Mount Noorat, 51, 75, 89, 189, New South Wales, 207, 383
197, 218, 222, 230, 278, 283, New Zealand, 31, 60, 323
284, 295, 302, 306, 307, 310, Ngelbakutya, 134
316, 318, 321, 324–327, 331, Niagara Falls, 198
334, 346–349 Noorat, 230, 293, 297, 312
Mount Porndon, 218, 323 Noumea, 296
Mount Rouse Protectorate Station, Nullaware, 85
189, 204 Nyawi, 134
Mount Rouse, 78, 123, 136, 162,
173, 189, 192, 195, 197, 222,
281, 292, 298, 301 O
Mount Shadwell, 85, 116, 189, 197, Orford, 162
204, 218, 221, 227, 250, 297 Oxfordshire, 61, 316
Mount Stavely, 90, 91, 291, 294
Mount Sturgeon, 190, 191, 197, 231
Mount Timboon, 293 P
Mount Warrnambool, 281, 282, Pare.in.gid.gid.galler, 134, 138
291, 292 Parl.ring.yalloke, 122, 128
Mount William (Gariwerd/The Par-woor-deet, 96, 126
Grampians), 133, 287 Penshurst, 189, 198, 282, 291, 292,
Mount William (Toolleen), 85 298, 300, 312, 324
Moutajup, 98 Pirron Yallock, 162
Moyne River, 190 Port Campbell, 85
Moyne River falls, 96 Port Fairy, 165, 181, 231, 281, 291
Mundy’s Gully, 210, 292, 317 Port Fairy District, 239
Port Jackson, 173, 285 Shanghai, 198

Port Phillip Bay, 174, 181, 183, 235 Shelford Forest, 165, 222
Portland, 85, 160, 167, 181, 184, Shelford, 223
194, 207, 225, 235, 281, 282, Skipton, 162, 167, 190, 191, 230,
285, 291, 331 231, 285, 292, 299, 328
Portland Bay, 194 Snowy River Valley, 184
Portland Bay District, 161 Southern Cross, 56, 137, 185, 196
Princeland, 281 Spirit Cave, 92
Pura Pura, 83–84, 92, 134, 138 Spring Hill, 327
Purnim, 280 Staubback Falls, 198
Purra Purra, 77, 134, 138 Stawell, 130
Puulorn buurn, 78 Stonehenge, 59, 136
Puuroy-uup, 193 Stony Rises, 84, 96, 99, 101, 103, 138,
Puutch been, 99 140, 166, 173, 179, 181, 182,
Pyrenees, 182, 230 191, 193, 194, 245, 282, 283,
295, 318, 319, 327, 334, 377
Streatham, 167, 190, 191, 299, 312
Q Sunset Country, 134
Queensland, 6 Sussex, 198, 217
Sydney Town, 156, 181
R
Red Gum Country, 182, 280, 325 T
Redruth, 167, 196 Taap heear, 78, 137
Robe, 85 Tabor, 280
Robertson’s Forest, 321 Tæ rak, 63, 89, 90, 99, 109, 117,
The Rocks, 54, 57, 96, 98, 125, 130, 118, 122, 126, 127
132–134, 179, 181, 182, 195, Tahara Parish, 312
206, 247 Tappoc, 98, 100, 107
Rokewood, 96, 213, 321, 323 Tar.rong, 128
Rose’s Gap, 84 Tarn wirring, 135
Rutledge Survey, 160, 225 Tarn wirrink, 135
Tarnpirr, 76, 85, 137, 138
Tarrayoukyan, 312
S Tarrington, 280
Salt Creek, 75, 89, 98, 121, 126, Taylor’s River, 164, 172, 191, 286
181, 327 Teerinyillum, 77
Scottish Borders, 50, 310 Terang, 128, 167, 173, 223, 291, 312
Scottish Lowlands, 168, 207, 348 Terang Parish, 312
Timboon, 188, 218, 280, 293, 319 Warrenheip Hills, 244

Tooli-o-rook, 213, 286 Warrion Hills, 235
Tooliorook, 308 Warrnambool, 181, 281, 282,
Toolleen, 85 291, 292
Toolondo, 90, 127 Wartook Reservoir, 84
Tooram, 312, 326 Waurn Ponds, 305, 306, 310, 311
Torong, 137 Wer.row.wer.rer, 73, 76
Tow.wer.deet.mole, 96 Werrenjerren, 85
Tower Hill, 184, 190, 199, 225, 300, Western District, 2, 3, 3n1, 6,
301, 339 8–10, 13, 49–68, 72, 73, 101,
Tung’ung bunnart, 122 216, 274, 285, 330,
Tuureen tuureen, 89, 121, 126 388–390, 404
Whittlebury Swamp, 193
Whoorel Parish, 167
U Wickliffe, 190, 191, 292, 299
Ummekulleen, 88, 138, 388 Wil-im-ee moor-ring, 89
Upper Wannon Falls, 237 Williams Town, 278
Ure, 85 Wiltshire, 61, 217, 316
Wimmera, 227, 295
Wimmera River, 134
V Winchelsea, 300
Vale of the Wando, 165, 166, 202, Winnidad Swamp, 224
203, 223, 224, 226, 228, Winter’s Flat, 188
229, 231, 249, 283, 325, Wirrengren Plain, 85
332, 334 Wit.ler.be.car.rac, 78
Van Diemen’s Land, 125, 204, 225 Witchellibah, 85
Victoria Gap, 92 Woodford, 295, 326
Victoria Range, 84, 92 The Woolshed, 189, 195, 205,
Victoria Valley, 291, 320 209, 218
Woolsthorpe, 167, 190, 292, 298
Wuukuurn, 137
W Wuurong killing, 138
Wando Vale, 325 Wuurong yæring, 59, 78
Wannon Falls, 196, 295
Wannon River, 326
Wannon Valley, 182, 184, 190, 205, Y
216, 230, 231, 314, 321, Yananginj Njawi, 92
325, 328 Yorkshire, 333
Warrebaal, 138 Yuumkuurtakk, 78
Run and Station Names Index
A The Beeches, 169

The Ashes, 169 Belmont, 346
Avalon, 278 The Bend, 324
Berrambool, 89, 91, 92, 100, 136
Berry Bank, 203, 210, 226, 227,
B 283, 306–309, 318, 323, 327
Baangal, 219, 227, 317, 321 Blackwood, 14, 64, 78, 104, 120,
Ballaarat, 188, 191 164, 173, 184, 197, 203,
Ballangeich, 229 211, 217–219, 221, 222,
Bamgamie, 190 231, 249, 284, 313,
Banongill, 321, 324, 347 315–317, 326, 404
Barna, 328 Bleak House, 305, 306
Barongarook House, 208 Blythvale, 209, 324
Baroona, 322 Boortkoi, 327
Barton Hall, 165 Borongarook, 334
Barunah Plain, 164, 165, 202, 208, Borriyalloak, 317
228, 273, 283, 304, 308, 318, Buninyong, 181
319, 323, 346 Buntingdale, 192, 203, 204
Barwon Park, 207, 208, 278, 293, 304, Burnbank, 123
305, 307, 333, 334, 339, 348 Burswood, 207
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3213-7
486 Run and Station Names Index
C Eumeralla, 123, 190, 203, 228,

Caramut, 89, 119, 165, 189, 195, 240, 286
209, 211, 218, 297, 316 Eumeralla West, 315
Carngham, 166, 168, 184, 309, Eurack, 305, 306, 318
331, 339 Eurambeen, 166, 209, 299, 317, 324
Carranballac, 195, 208, 212, 299,
309, 317, 321, 331, 347
Carr’s Plains, 304 F
Challicum, 202, 203, 219, 317, 324 Fernlea, 91
Chatsworth House, 91, 100, 208, Fiery Creek, 134, 138, 190, 191,
212, 278, 304, 325 219, 230
Cherongemarah, 160
Chetwynd, 101
Chocolyn, 165 G
Clunies, 304 Gala, 191, 196, 198, 208, 209, 305,
Clyde, 331 308, 317, 321, 324
Condah Hills, 226 Gherangermarajah, 203, 207,
Coragulac House, 305 221, 226
Cororooke House, 323, 325 Glenaber, 92, 136
Glenfine, 306
Glengleeson, 319, 320, 327
D Glenisla, 92, 305, 309
Dalvui, 324, 346 Glenormiston, 77, 165, 166, 181,
Darlington, 137, 168, 191, 299 188, 202, 203, 205–208,
Devon Park, 278 210–212, 227, 228, 231, 240,
Dunmore, 184, 188, 203, 226–228, 283, 293, 309, 318, 324, 346
240, 304, 319, 320, 326 Gnarkeet, 226
Gnarpurt, 209, 210, 235, 309, 311,
317, 321
E Golf Hill, 160, 166, 188, 200, 202,
Earlston, 198 204, 207, 227, 283, 300,
Eddington, 316 306, 318
Eeyeuk, 299, 306, 307, 324 Goodwood, 198, 213, 227, 240, 284
Elephant Hut, 204 Gorrinn, 184, 210, 309
Ercildoun, 198, 204, 210, 212, 225 The Grange, 162, 168, 180, 181,
Ercildoune, 242, 283, 293, 308, 189, 190
321, 323, 324, 326, Grange Burn, 100, 168, 181, 189,
339, 349 190, 205, 230, 315, 318
Run and Station Names Index 487
Grassmere, 165, 181, 202, 203 Kongbool, 306

Green Hills, 94, 95, 280 Konongwootong, 194
Greenvale, 168 Koolomurt, 325
Gringegalgona, 195, 210, 300, 305, Koort-koort-nong, 212, 226, 236,
310, 322, 325, 347 240, 246, 323
The Gums, 164, 169, 278, 306, Koroite, 98, 194
316, 346 Korongeeballoort, 169
Kout Norein, 190
Kuruc-a-ruc, 208, 304, 308, 309
H
Hamilton Downs, 318
Harton Hills, 165, 240 L
Hexham Park, 196 Lake Bolac, 181, 183, 190, 191
The Hill, 226, 318, 324, 334 Lake Condah, 63, 89, 99, 109, 117,
Hopkins Hill, 208, 212 138, 193, 196, 326
Lake Repose, 182
Langford, 283, 309, 318, 325
I Langi Willi, 166, 184, 188, 226,
Ingleby, 168, 208, 278, 308 249, 283, 292, 322,
Injemira, 123, 305, 315 324, 339
Inverary, 325 Larra, 198, 209, 210, 212, 219, 228,
Irrewarra, 212, 278 283, 299, 300, 306, 308, 310,
317, 320, 321, 324, 327, 331,
347, 349
J The Laurels, 347
Jancourt, 165, 283 Ledcourt, 287
Leslie Manor, 308, 309
Lexington, 202
K Lyne, 214, 217
Kangatong, 190, 217, 315
Keilambete, 89, 91, 192, 195,
202, 209 M
Kerangeballort, 169, 207, 209 Mahwallock, 229
Kinghorn, 99 Maretimo, 207
Kolor, 123, 175, 189, 202, 203, 210, Marida Yallock, 165, 197, 324, 346
224, 283, 300, 303, 304, The Meadows, 308
312, 319 Meningoort, 221, 293, 306, 316,
Konawarren, 164, 231 321, 323, 347
488 Run and Station Names Index
Merino Downs, 79, 165, 188, 190, N

198, 203, 225, 227, 278, Nareeb-nareeb, 91, 136, 299
300, 322 Naringal, 195, 280, 299
Merrang, 59, 90, 125, 164, 188, 196, Narrapumelap, 190, 202, 305, 307,
210, 231, 299, 304, 324, 347 308, 310, 321, 324, 347, 349
Minjah, 212, 217, 240, 304, Native Hut No. 2, 188
305, 315 Nerrin Nerrin, 184
Minjah House, 137 North Brighton, 202
Monivae, 222, 226, 306, 322, 325
Mooleric, 323
Mooramong, 305, 306 O
Mount Bute, 321, 327 The Oakes, 169
Mount Elephant, 204, 212, 308, Ondit, 123
309, 321, 324
Mount Emu, 317
Mount Fyans, 138, 295, 304, 306 P
Mount Hesse, 164, 203, 210, 212, Poligolet, 306
222, 223, 227, 228, 273, 283, Polmenna, 323
305, 306, 309, 318, 319, 321, Port Fairy, 165, 181, 231, 239, 281, 291
323, 327 Prestonholme, 325
Mount Koroite, 190 Pullemere, 168
Mount Mitchell, 79, 221 Purrumbete, 162, 165, 166, 188,
Mount Noorat, 51, 278, 283, 302, 198, 202, 203, 209, 212, 218,
306, 307, 310, 318, 321, 225, 226, 229–231, 235, 278,
324–326, 331, 334, 346–349 283, 292, 307, 316, 320–323,
Mount Rouse, 189, 192, 195, 197, 281 326–328, 334, 347
Mount Shadwell, 189, 204, 218, 221
Mountside, 306
Mount Sturgeon, 190, 191, 231 Q
Mount William, 184, 210, 246, 346 Quamby, 217, 222, 315, 327
Moyne Falls, 319, 320
Muntham, 190, 211, 212, 229, 231,
249, 278, 314 R
Murndal, 51, 80, 204, 206, 212, Renny Hill, 78, 322, 323, 346
226–228, 278, 299, 306–309, Richmond, 168
318, 321, 322, 325, 326, Richmond Hill, 168
346, 347 Ripple Vale, 207, 305
Murroa, 95, 222 Rosemount, 347
Run and Station Names Index 489
S V
St Enoch, 317–319, 324 Vasey, 325
Sandford, 190, 204, 211, 312
The Sisters, 228, 230, 318
Skene, 174, 278 W
South Challicum, 92, 134, 138 Wando Dale, 306
Springbyrne, 168 Wando Vale, 165, 166, 202, 203,
Spring Creek, 59, 190, 236, 237 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 231,
Squattlesea Mere, 165, 184, 188, 249, 283, 325, 332, 334
202, 203, 217, 249 Wannon, 77, 138, 181, 196, 198,
Stonefield, 319, 320 235, 237, 281, 286, 295, 298,
Stony Point, 306, 316, 321, 324 300, 314, 344
Swinton, 287 Watch Hill, 212
Weerangourt, 173, 217
Werribee Park, 278, 305, 329
T West Cloven Hills, 196, 299, 316
Tahara, 198, 311, 312 Wickham Park, 327
Talindert, 306, 316, 323, 346, 347 Willaroo, 347
Tandarook, 165, 204, 208, 285, 327 Wiridgil, 283
Tarndwarncoort, 165, 169, 207, Woolongoon, 346
208, 306, 321, 323 Wooloomanata, 278
Tarrone, 126 Wooriwyrite, 164, 193, 196, 210,
Terrinallum, 166, 283, 295, 308, 212, 218, 223, 226, 230, 283,
309, 321, 345 300, 306, 307, 309, 316, 321,
Titanga, 180, 227, 304, 305, 307, 323, 331, 334
308, 317, 320, 321, 324, Wurroit, 305
347, 349 Wurrook, 208, 304, 307
Trawalla, 111, 122, 124, 187, 188,
202, 203, 209, 211, 220, 225,
227, 236, 241, 324, 346 Y
Yalla-y-poora, 165, 209, 219, 309,
317, 324
U Yambuk, 135, 195, 205
The Union, 190, 222, 315 Yarima, 208, 304
Uondo, 323 Yeo, 306

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Exploring Place

ISBN 978-981-19-3212-0 ISBN 978-981-19-3213-7 (eBook)

Contributor: Ashley Whitworth / Alamy Stock Photo

The ethos of this timely book is encapsulated in the aforementioned

Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies Ken Taylor AM

While English remains pre-eminent in editorial and academic expecta-

Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria,

Landscape is a sea of myths and embroidery threads in a larger tapestry.

challenging alternate avenue for reading and inquiring into landscape

Keywords Sense of Place • genius loci • Country • Indigenous Knowledge

particular to the landscape and properties of the Western District that

7.3 Contemporary Narratives 384

Plant and Animal Nomenclature Glossary409

Run and Station Names Index487

David S. Jones is a Professor (Research) at the Indigenous Studies

Lands and City Layout’ National Heritage registration; co-authored

Fig. 1.1 Landscape features and townships 7

Fig. 6.5 Routes of travellers. Source: H. Cornish, Under the Southern

Table 2.1 Western story and narrative distinctions and relationships.

Table 7.3 Thematic mapping and evaluation—post-colonisation

THEY are rhymes rudely strung with intent less

Where in dreariest days, when all dews end,

Dry deserts with long pent up passion—

These expressive words embody the confrontational tension about the

I love a sunburnt country,

Note the unfathomableness in both authors’ voices, the synergistic

For many Eastern authors and travellers it is deeply embodied in their

1.2 Sense of Place

to do it in a methodological approach that enables some measure of

Spirit of place is defined as the tangible (buildings, sites, landscapes, routes,

But this is ‘spirit’ and not ‘sense’.

and Pope and Seddon instructionally direct us to ‘consult’ and ‘analyse’

1.3 Journey into Landscape

Fig. 1.1 Landscape features and townships

1.4 PreCursors for This Journey

In 1731, poet Alexander Pope made genius loci an important principle in

To build, to plant, whatever you intend,

15th February 1949.

Both contain abstractions and signal meanings of place nested in a

tangible, intangible, and metaphysical qualities and meanings. Thus, a

‘Place’ has a character and attributes, which distinguish it from other

2.2 Navigating the Western Philosophy

discourses, including spirit of place, space, landscape (as environment

place needs to be experienced because ‘there is no knowing or sensing a

It may be useful to think of places, not as areas on maps; but as constantly

Thus, Vecco (2020) argues that genius loci should be interpreted as a

conceptualisation of the lifeworld, as rephrased by Abram (1996, 40) as

… willingness to be open to significances of a place, to feel it, to know and

2.3 Navigating the Landscape of Genius

‘Sense of place’ is a much used expression, chiefly by architects but taken

Genius loci is contemporary and continuing notion in Western writ-

later rejected its phenomenological implications and emphasised the

But, a warning. The way we view and read landscape is influenced by

then, has powerful physical, environmental, economic, cultural, psycho-

Narratives are and therefore can be landscapes. In this sense, stories,

7.3 Contemporary Narratives 384

Plant and Animal Nomenclature Glossary409

Run and Station Names Index487

Fig. 1.1 Landscape features and townships 7

1.2 Sense of Place

1.3 Journey into Landscape

1.4 PreCursors for This Journey

2.2 Navigating the Western Philosophy

2.3 Navigating the Landscape of Genius

2.4 Navigating Country [of Genius]

The Wadawurrung language is dynamic. In our eyes ‘Wadawurrung’ is English-

2.5 Roadmaps to Reading, Experiencing,

3.1 Living in Australia Felix

3.2 Rhythms: The Land Beyond the Sky

3.3 Rhythms Tapestry

4.1 ‘Here Is My Country …; My Barbary’