The Squatters by Barry Stone

Author:Barry Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2018-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Two men outside slab huts surrounded by forest, Victoria, 1909.

Frank Ernest Allen, State Library Victoria

5

‘THE FINEST PARK LAND I EVER SAW …’

‘I stuck a plough into the ground, struck a she-oak root, and broke the point; cleaned my gun, shot a kangaroo, mended the bellows, blew the forge fire, straightened the plough … and turned the first sod in Victoria.’

—Edward Henty, pioneer and pastoralist

In 1834, Edward Henty and his brother Stephen became the first Europeans to settle, illegally, the virtually unknown area around Portland Bay in what was then called the Port Phillip District. They had arrived in Western Australia two years earlier with their father Thomas but after constant disasters they had abandoned their 84,000-acre Swan River property and sailed to Van Diemen’s Land, only to arrive there too late to take advantage of its productive, freehold lands, all of which had already been sold. Packing up again they boarded their family-owned brigantine schooner the Thistle and arrived in Portland Bay in 1834, complete with bullocks, cows, pigs and baskets of flour and tobacco. If settlers were getting away with squatting beyond the reach of the law in the heavily settled colony of New South Wales, imagine what could be gained for yourself in far away Portland Bay!

The Henty family were in the Portland Bay area for six years before they came to the notice of the New South Wales surveyor-general in 1840, after the soon-to-be colony of Victoria began being subdivided into districts, and commissioners were appointed to legitimise their graziers by issuing licences. Their presence there had not been wholly unknown, however. In September 1834, a grazier near Campbell Town in central Van Diemen’s Land wrote to Governor Arthur Phillip in Hobart: ‘It has become known to me that a party has it in contemplation to take possession of a tract of country at Portland Bay, independent of His Majesty’s Government, by virtue of a treaty with the natives’. Although the dating of this letter seems odd considering Edward Henty’s own diary doesn’t reference first negotiating with Aborigines until two months later in December, there seems little doubt that in the absence of government support, the invincible Henty family had decided to create a treaty of their own.

The Hentys have long been considered Victoria’s first squatters. They established their farm and a little more than two years later began a whaling station at Portland Bay. When the surveyor and explorer Thomas Mitchell, to his utter surprise, encountered the family on 29 August 1836 while on his exploration of western Victoria, he suggested they move their station north to the fertile, lush pastures he’d seen around the Wannon River, a region he called Australia Felix, Latin for ‘fortunate Australia’. The Hentys heeded his advice, and after gathering their flocks and herds set out towards Merino Downs, which they reached on 3 August 1837.

The family prospered from Mitchell’s advice, increasing their stock to 30,000 sheep and 500 head of cattle in just three years. (The ruts made by Thomas

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