James Dawson’s intervention in the naming of the Maroondah Aqueduct in 1881-83
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: La Trobe Journal Vol. 97, no. March (2016), p. 91-104
- Full Text: false
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- Description: This paper is concerned with the renaming of the Watts River Scheme at its official opening in 1891 to Maroondah. It reveals that the driving force behind the name change was, in all likelihood, James Dawson, whose interest in Aboriginal place names and his association with the Upper Yarra since 1840 saw him undertake a field visit to the Coranderrk Aboriginal settlement to meet with Aboriginal elders and learn their traditional names for the locality. Before venturing in to the field, however, he discussed his plans with the relevant official in charge in the Water Department and received a promise from the official that he would do all he could to meet Dawson’s views on the desirability for a name change. Dawson’s wishes were realised at the official opening, however the assigned convict George Watts’s name still remains associated with the stream in which he drowned.
Winda lingo parugoneit or Why set the bush on fire? Fire and Victorian Aboriginal people on the colonial frontier
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , McMaster, Sarah , Clark, Ian , Kerin, Rani , Wright, Wendy
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Historical Studies Vol. 47, no. 2 (2016), p. 225-240
- Full Text: false
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- Description: There is an ethnographic and historical record that, despite its paucity, can offer specific insight into various contextual matters (purpose, motivations, acknowledgement) relating to how and why fire was being used by Victorian Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century. This insight is essential to developing cross-culturally appropriate land and fire management strategies in the present and into the future. This article demonstrates the need for further research into historical accounts of Aboriginal burning in Victoria.
'John and Jackey': An exploration of Aboriginal and Chinese people's associations on the Victorian goldfields
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australasian Mining History Vol. 13, no. No. (2015), p. 23-41
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: While much has been written about Chinese miners, much less has been said about Aboriginal miners and even less about Aboriginal-Chinese relations on the gold fields and elsewhere. Historians and other writers, such as Stephenson, Dunstan, Gittins, Cronin, Ramsay and Edwards and Shen, have largely ignored Aboriginal associations with Chinese people in colonial Victoria. Eric Rolls's study is representative of this absence - when discussing Australia's colonial racial policies towards the Chinese on the Victorian gold fields, Rolls is reluctant to draw many parallels between the Chinese, one group of people largely hidden from the historical gaze, and Aborigines, another group almost expunged from memory. A similar pattern can be seen in the historiography of encounters in other nations between Indigenous and Chinese people, such as in New Zealand and British Columbia where the paucity of the records initially led Yu to note: 'Here was a world only glimpsed'.
A letter home to Scotland from Warrenheip in April 1857 : Insights into life in a railway survey camp
- Authors: Clark, Ian , Kicinski, Beth
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 86, no. 2 (2015), p. 363-380
- Full Text: false
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- Description: This paper is concerned to publish a letter sent from a railway survey camp at Warrenheip in April 1857 by an assistant surveyor named John C Macdonald to his sister in Scotland. The letter was sent on an issue of the News Letter of Australasia. The letter provides insights into the living conditions of survey camps; the perils of travelling in the bush; nascent goldfields tourism, with its practice of taking visitors down into mines to see how they operated; and the difficulty of maintaining communication between families at home and their kin who had migrated to Australia. The letter was found in a suitcase of miscellaneous papers in an auction in Scotland in October 2012 and is published here for the first time.
The Mãori presence in Victoria, Australia, 1830-1900 : A preliminary analysis of Australian sources
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: New Zealand Journal of History Vol. 48, no. 1 (2014), p. 109-126
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This essay explores the presence of M
The Tara-Waragal and the Governors levee in Melbourne, 1863-A reinterpretation of Woiwurrung local group organisation
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Aboriginal Studies Vol. , no. 1 (December 2014 2014), p. 33-54
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This paper concerns the question of why there are so few named groups in the Woiwurrung language area compared with other language groups to its west and north-west. It does this by analysing the 1863 Governors levee in which representatives from three Aboriginal groups-the Boonwurrung, Woiwurrung and Tara-Waragal-presented gifts to royalty. In seeking to understand who this third group-the Tara-Waragal-was, Stephens (2003) has suggested that they were a Woiwurrung patriline. Wesson (2001) has suggested that the name was a pejorative label applied to a Gippsland group by the Kulin. This study finds that both interpretations are wrong. First, it finds that the name applies to a Brataualung clan, the Yowung, whose country centred on the Tarra and Warrigal creeks-hence the name. Second, it finds that the attempt by Stephens to identify the Tara-Waragal with a possible Woiwurrung patriline identified in a series of sketches by William Thomas found in the RB Smyth Papers was also a failure. Nevertheless, the implication that the sketch maps may reveal up to 53 patrilines is a possibility worth exploring, as it may address the issue of the apparent under-representation of Woiwurrung named groups with which I began. Analysis reveals the possibility of an additional 27 Woiwurrung patrilines. Although the exact number of additional patrilines will never be known, at least we have addressed the issue that within the ethno-historical record it is possible to find additional named groups in Woiwurrung. Thus there was in all likelihood greater internal division in the Woiwurrung than has been reconstructed by Barwick (1984) and Clark (1990).
- Description: C1
Death of a hutkeeper near Geelong in 1840: A new investigative approach
- Authors: Clark, Ian , Kicinski, Beth , Arthur, Teigan
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. , no. 84 (2013), p. 1
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: In February 1840, Assistant Protector Charles Sievwright investigated the murder of a hutkeeper- a ticket of leave man (a parolee restricted to a particular geographical location) named Michael 'Micky' Wilson - at an outlying hut on the Derwent Company's Weatherboard Station near Geelong. Four years later, murder was included in an official return sent from Superindent La Trobe's office of the number of European settlers killed by the Aborigibes in the Port Phillip district since its occupation. The death received little attention in historical studies until it was listed in a 1974 publication of a table of suspected deaths of Europeans at the hands of Aborigines. This case study highlights the often discontinuous chain of evidence underpinning historical interpretations and demonstrates how earlier conflation of cultural collisions and frontier violence - in explorations of the nature of murder in Victoria's early colonial history - may be overcome.
Exploring is a killing game only to those who do not know anything about it: William Lockhart Morton and other contemporary views about the Victorian exploring expedition and its fate.
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The Aboriginal story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten narratives p. 47-60
- Full Text: false
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Goulburn River Aboriginal Protectorate : a history of the Goulburn River Aboriginal Protectorate Station at Murchison Victoria, 1840-1853.
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Book
- Full Text: false
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- Description: "The central station of the Goulburn River Aboriginal Protectorate District at what is now Murchison, which operated from 1840 until 1853, is a significant post-contact Aboriginal site on the Goulburn River. It was the focus of interaction between Aboriginal communities, particularly the Daungwurrung, Ngurai-illam wurrung, and Yorta Yorta peoples, government officials and settlers during the early years of contact in the Port Phillip District. The site continued to hold significance to Aboriginal people after the 1850s, linking pre- and post-contact histories and geographies. Through a meticulous analysis of official correspondence and other protectorate records, private journals, and reminiscences, this study reveals that the Murchison locality is one of the most important historic Aboriginal places in regional Victoria. " --cover.
The aboriginal legacy of the Burke and Wills expedition: An introduction
- Authors: Clark, Ian , Cahir, David (Fred)
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: The Aboriginal story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten narratives p. 1-14
- Full Text: false
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Isabella Lucy Bird's visit to Victoria in 1872: The forgotten tourist
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 82, no. 2 (2011), p. 194-211
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Isabella Lucy Bird, the English travel writer visited Victoria and spent eight weeks touring around Melbourne and western Victoria. In 1877, she published a nine-part account of her visit, The Leisure Hour.
- Description: 2003009005
The convincing ground aboriginal massacre at Portland Bay, Victoria: fact or fiction?
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Aboriginal History Vol. 35, no. (2011), p. 79-109
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: In 2005 the so-called 'Aboriginal History wars' moved from Tasmania to a new convincing ground in Victoria. Michael Connor contested the historiography behind an alleged Aboriginal massacre at a site known as the 'Convincing Ground', at Allestree, on the coast some ten kilometres north of Portland. The site came to public attention in January 2005 when Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Officers halted bulldozing and development work that had begun as part of a proposed coastal residential development. It subsequently became the subject of a Federal Court Native Title case and a Victorian Civil Administrative Tribunal hearing. The dispute with the residential developer was settled in February 2007 when it was agreed that an area of land that encompasses the Convincing Ground would be set aside as a reservation.
- Description: 2003008944
Understanding Ngamadjidi: Aboriginal perceptions of Europeans in nineteenth century Western Victoria
- Authors: Clark, Ian , Cahir, David (Fred)
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Colonial History Vol. 13, no. 1 (2011), p. 105-124
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article considers how Aboriginal people in western Victoria understood the arrival of Europeans, particularly how Aboriginal groups in that region reportedly recognised Europeans as deceased clan members who had returned to life. According to R.H. Mathews, the belief in transmigration or reincarnation was widespread during the early years of European settlement, being 'observed in every part of Australia where investigations have been made'. In western Victoria these resuscitated people were known as ngamadjidj (generally translated by linguists as 'stranger' or 'white man'). Tony Swain argues that the classification of Whites as deceased Aboriginal people have been misunderstood as merely 'a quaint instance of an aboriginal failure to comprehend novel events' reflecting a general poverty of scholarship in the area. This article will consider numerous first-hand accounts by whites identified as ngamadjidj, as well some of the more recent anthropological and historical comments on the subject, in order to make observations on what this phenomenon tells us about Aboriginal and European interpretations of one another, and how it shaped racial relationships.
- Description: 2003008921
Aboriginal Language Areas in Northeast Victoria: 'Mogullumbidj' Reconsidered
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2010
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 81, no. 2 (2010), p.
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: This article focuses on Aboriginal language area reconstruction in north-east Victoria, particularly Mogullumbidj, one of the most problematical areas in Victoria. It shows that a careful analysis of primary sources is still capable of generating fresh insights and removing some of the confusion that surrounds language area reconstruction. The re-analysis of primary references shows that none of the earlier delineations, such as Tindale, Barwick, Clark and Wesson, has integrity. The resolution of the significance of the label 'Mogullumbidj" was found by examining the reaction of southwest Victorian aboriginal peoples to the Tasmanian Aboriginal man who accompanied Robinson on his 1841 journey through their lands. This revealed that the word was descriptive and not a linguistic lab
The case of Peter Mungett : Born out of the allegiance of the Queen, belonging to a sovereign and independent tribe of Ballan
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2009
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Provenance : The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria Vol. 8, no. (2009), p.15-34
- Full Text:
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- Description: This paper is concerned with the jurisdiction of the British colonial criminal law over Indigenous Australians, particularly in the area of serious offences such as murder and rape. In particular, the paper examines the attempted use in the 1860 case of Regina v Peter of the legal demurrer that the accused Aboriginal man was not subject to the jurisdiction of the court because he was not born a British subject and had never entered into allegiance to the British Queen. The paper also discusses some of the difficulties which the legal authorities found in dealing with this issue, even as late as 1860. The issue of the amenability to British law was a significant one in the early colonial period; it then largely disappeared from serious public consideration but has resurfaced since the 1980s in the context of land rights, native title, and the status of Aboriginal customary law.
- Description: 2003007342
The northern Wathawurrung and Andrew Porteous, 1860-1877
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Aboriginal History Vol. 32, no. (2008), p. 97-108
- Full Text:
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- Description: The operation of the Central Board and the Board for the Protection of Aborigines in Victoria has been studied by Marcard, Penney and Clark. There are numerous studies of particular stations and reserves that existed during the operation of the Board; for example, Lake Condah, Framlingham, Ebenezer and Coranderrk. A third tier of study relates to particular individuals and, though these studies are not expressly concerned with their responsibilities as 'Honorary Correspondents' to the Board, they nevertheless discuss relationships with Aborigines. This paper adds to these studies by concentrating on one of those correspondents, Andrew Porteous
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003006899
Why should they pay money to the Queen?: Aboriginal miners and land claims
- Authors: Cahir, David (Fred) , Clark, Ian
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Australian Colonial History Vol. 10, no. 1 (2008), p. 115-128
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: There is little evidence of Aboriginal involvement in the events of the Eureka Stockade, but there are numerous ways in which Aboriginal people are relevant to the Eureka story. The events took place on Aboriginal land (an obvious but rarely articulated truth) and Aboriginal people were present on the Ballarat diggings, as they were, indeed, on and around most Australian goldfields. The records are full of references to their fundamental and diverse contribution to life and work on the diggings, and to the complex and varied relationships they formed with the invaders. For Indigenous communities already reeling from the invasion of pastoralists, the arrival of 300,000 immigrant miners, swarming onto the alluvial districts of Victoria, represented a second wave of dispossession. But as we have noted elsewhere, there is abundant evidence that gold, at least in Victoria, brought many new economic opportunities for Aborigines, many of whom took advantage of these changed circumstances.' David Goodman argues persuasively for historians to consider an 'edgier interpretation' of the goldfields story. This could include a better appreciation of the social dislocation and cultural adaptations experienced by Indigenous people on the goldfields .
- Description: C1
'You have all this place, no good have children……' Derrimut : Traitor, saviour, or a man of his people?
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society Vol. 91, no. pt.2 (2005), p. 107-132
- Full Text:
- Reviewed:
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001043
Antecedent force : The Port Phillip Aboriginal protectorate domestic European constabulary 1840-1843
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 76, no. 1 (2005), p. 68-82
- Full Text:
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- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001173
George Augustus Robinson : His value as a resource for place names research
- Authors: Clark, Ian
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Victorian Historical Journal Vol. 76, no. 2 (2005), p. 165-179
- Full Text:
- Reviewed:
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003001172