It was, Batman wrote, ‘Land of the best description, equal to any in the world … the most beautiful sheep pasturage I ever saw in my life.’ Batman is best known for his role, in June 1835, identifying a site on the Yarra River, which would later become the city of Melbourne and negotiating a shamefully dishonest treaty. My highlights in the SMB job included organising field excursions with local and regional Aboriginal students from several of the courses. As a postscript, Barry Golding recovered a piece of the mill stone on the likely former Protectorate mill site at the end of the mill race in the 1980’s, though it may instead be from a later mill constructed by Minotti in the 1850s. Most of the Aboriginal people who were forcibly moved from Mt Franklin to Coranderrk in 1864 has died within 12 years. Some of these stories come from my own experience. The settlers coming from northern Tasmania to the early Melbourne settlement following Batman quickly identified fertile volcanic grasslands including some that were immediately south of Dja Dja Wurrung country.
The Board is developing a Joint Management Plan (JMP) for the six parks that make up the ‘Appointed Lands’. Edgar Morrison refers in one of his booklets to an early map of Franklinford on a solicitor’s office in Daylesford. William Mitchell was then at ‘Barfold’ between the Coliban and Campaspe Rivers northeast of Malmsbury from 1842-5. In February 1835 whilst Hepburn was sailing the Alice from Hobart to Sydney, one of his passengers happened to be John Gardiner, a Dubliner who was giving up a banking career to invest in stock. Rhodes concluded it is of great historical significance. E. S. Parker (born in London, 1802, died 26 April 1865) and J. S. Hepburn (born in East Lothian, Scotland, 1803, died 27 July 1860) lived somewhat parallel but very different lives, and in their last 25 years lived only 20km apart. Like Edgar Morrison’s work from the same era, whilst well researched it tends unashamedly towards being a hagiography, a biography that treats its subject fairly uncritically and with some reverence.

Rhodes, D. (1985) An Historical and Archaeological Investigation of the Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate Station and Mount Franklin Aboriginal Reserve, Occasional Report No. ‘Powlet and Hunter’ were at the station and not all was in order. This was 60 years after the Weipa Presbyterian Mission outpost was established in 1898 and over 100 years since the Loddon Protectorate closed near Daylesford. Mitchell was so enchanted by the area centred on what we now know to be Dja Dja Wurrung country and called it “Australia Felix”. Not everyone approved of the scheme. On 30 January 1850 Robinson wrote: ‘Could not get the natives to attend school until the dogs was at work. The photograph below of the map, last added to in the late 1960s and now in the Donald History and Natural History Museum, was taken by Ann Dunstan  in June 2018. No one before Aldo had ever brought alcohol into our family home. He also met and visited Hepburn several times. Alienation from their land and insanitary conditions at Coranderrk were among the major causes of death. DDWCAC: Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation (2014a) Families of Dja Dja Wurrung, with Jessica Hodgens, Djuwima-Djarra: Sharing Together: Dja Dja Wurrung : Our Story. They stood still and we brought out what guns we had in the hut, and we called out as if there were other people about us. As early as 1827, with John Batman, Gellibrand had unsuccessfully applied for a grant of land at Port Phillip, the petitioners stating that they were prepared to bring with them sheep and cattle. Robinson was losing patience with Parker, who claimed he had come to town and lost his horse: Fudge! Mrs H. at Mr Budds for three months. Dja Dja Wurrung people, voices and insights. Her father ‘Dicky, Yerrebulluk, country at Hurkinson’ was amongst the men listed, a Dja Dja Wurrung man likely then aged approximately 24 years. Whilst the Port Phillip Protectorate system was a variation on the previous tragic theme, as of March 1839, Rae-Ellis (1988) noted that Robinson had no clear idea on how to actually proceed or what his duties were as Chief Protector.

Rhodes (1995, p.72) concluded that many of the features described in detail in his report are historically significant, and that: the [Loddon] Protectorate station site is significant at a statewide level by virtue of: … the themes of contact and dispossession of Aboriginal land and as one of the places where the foundations of European attempts to institutionalise Aboriginal people in Australia were laid down. I also addressed them … Mr Parker had service to persons in his own house and prayers morning and evening.’. The first is the old (approximately 500 million year old) bedrock of tightly folded (Ordovician) shales and slates, where it is not covered by either relatively recent basalt (only a few million years old at most) or alluvium. To his credit, Edgar Morrison did acknowledge and value an Aboriginal present and voice, and made contact in the 1960s and 70s with then living descendants from the Loddon Protectorate during the 1860s, including with Thomas Dunolly’s (born 1854. The next phase of European land use settlement in Dja Dja Wurrung country from 1851 was very different, in that it mainly involved gold mining and many more people in the landscape, mostly conducted in the older ‘basement’ rocks under or around the elevated edges of the  volcanic plains. He acknowledged the probability ‘that uncivilized races should perish before the march of civilization’, but denied ‘its inevitable necessity’ in relation to the Australian Aborigines, using Christian theology to back his contention. Robinson’s understanding of the Aboriginal psyche was masterly, unsurpassed by anyone working with the blacks in Australia at that time. The natives have made Mitchell’s highroad their road. Arriving before sundown, Robinson wrote: ‘Mr Parker there. Darwin writes that ‘Mollison named his new run Jumra. It was Parker who believed that the Protectors needed some inducement to encourage Aborigines to be concentrated on protectorate stations, in the form of clothing, food and shelter. Some of the apparently older ovens were bleached of much of their carbon and just had the clay balls eroding out, some of which were the size of small footballs.

The Hepburn family had initially camped in a tent at what became Smeaton Hill station after three months of arduous travel. From Mr Mollison’s station we passed by Mount Alexander, followed the Loddon down over the localities lately rendered famous by the gold mines of Forest Creek and Bendigo, and crossed the plains of the Deep Creek to the Mount Beckwith Ranges … to Mount Misery. No monarch stalked abroad with greater kingly dignity than King Billy. "Starting from next week there'll be about 9,000 trees planted on the Mt Barker property; that's an amazing partnership between Dja Dja Wurrung and the Mt Alexander Landcare groups. Those Dja Dja Wurrung descendants who have survived include the family of Thomas Dunolly (1856-1923) who was brought to Coranderrk from Mt Franklin in 1863 (Rhodes, 1995, p.44). This explanation in Mollison’s words, three months after Robinson wrote that Hepburn calls the area ‘Jim Crow’ seems dubious. The most notable example of this is Djuwima Djarra, published in 2014 based on stories, records and recollections of some of the estimated 2,000 Dja Dja Wurrung descendants and the small number of known apical ancestors when the total likely Dja Dja Wurrung population plunged to perhaps 20 people. Another, ex-convict Lee was badly wounded, likely in a reprisal attack. "We've identified several land management areas that need to be addressed: the promotion of natural revegetation, the planting of native trees and shrubs; pest eradication and weed control; maintenance of existing tracks and erosion control.
G. A. Robinson was also born in London but 11 years earlier (1791) than Parker, and died in 1866, the year after Parker. In Rae-Ellis’ summation (1988, p.xvi), Robinson’s ‘… reputation as the friend of the Aborigine was the creation of Robinson’s imagination, designed solely to enhance his career. With the encouragement and support of Gib Wettenhall, a good friend, writer and publisher from nearby Mollongghip, we optimistically hope to eventually publish something written and published by Gib in his award winning style, based on some of this. On 26 April 1843 he wrote ‘No school at Parkers’, before leaving the next day for Melbourne. They continued on to other squatting stations towards the Werribee where similar ‘depredations’ took place. They were seldom right on water but on rising ground away from it.