Victorian Historical Journal

VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 87, NUMBER 1, JUNE 2016 ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF VICTORIA VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF VICTORIA The Royal Historical Society of Victoria is a community organisation comprising people from many fields committed to collecting, researching and sharing an understanding of the history of Victoria. The Victorian Historical Journal is a fully refereed journal dedicated to Australian, and especially Victorian, history produced twice yearly by the Publications Committee, Royal Historical Society of Victoria. PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE Jill Barnard Marilyn Bowler Richard Broome (Convenor) Marie Clark Mimi Colligan Don Garden (President, RHSV) Don Gibb David Harris (Editor, Victorian Historical Journal) Kate Prinsley Marian Quartly (Editor, History News) John Rickard Judith Smart (Review Editor) Chips Sowerwine Carole Woods BECOME A MEMBER Membership of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria is open. All those with an interest in history are welcome to join. Subscriptions can be purchased at: Royal Historical Society of Victoria 239 A’Beckett Street Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia Telephone: 03 9326 9288 Email: [email protected] www.historyvictoria.org.au Journals are also available for purchase online: www.historyvictoria.org.au/publications/victorian-historical-journal VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL ISSUE 285 VOLUME 87, NUMBER 1 JUNE 2016 Royal Historical Society of Victoria Victorian Historical Journal Published by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 239 A’Beckett Street Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia Telephone: 03 9326 9288 Fax: 03 9326 9477 Email: [email protected] www.historyvictoria.org.au Copyright © the authors and the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 2016 All material appearing in this publication is copyright and cannot be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher and the relevant author. Design: Janet Boschen, Boschen Design Desktop Production: John Gillespie, Kiplings Business Communications Printer: BPA Print Group Print Post Approved: PP349181/00159 ISSN 1030 7710 The Royal Historical Society of Victoria acknowledges the support of the Victorian Government though Creative Victoria—Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. Front cover: South Melbourne showing the Robur Tea Building, c. 1927. Courtesy State Library of Victoria. VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL VOLUME 87, NUMBER 1 JUNE 2016 ARTICLES Introduction 1 David Harris Wodonga’s Bonegilla: Depicting and Remembering the Impact of 5 Post-war Immigration Bruce Pennay Empires of Leaves: Tea Traders in Late Nineteenth-century and 29 Edwardian Melbourne Peter Griggs Brahé’s Cache 58 David Corke The Eureka Treason Trials: 160 Years On 76 The Hon. Marilyn Warren AC Frankenstein, Convicts and Wide-awake Geniuses: 99 The Life and Death of Charles Brentani Douglas Wilkie The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port 118 Phillip’s Convicts Thomas Rogers Lost and Found Wetlands of Melbourne 135 Rod Giblett HISTORICAL NOTES Chasing Ned Kelly: A Policeman’s Working Diary for 1879: John Sadleir 157 Richard Sadleir Charting Some Port Phillip Myths 163 Susan Priestley v REVIEWS Jean Galbraith: Writer in a Valley 173 By Meredith Fletcher Kylie Mirmohamadi Coastal Guide to Nature and History: Port Phillip Bay 174 By Graham Patterson Alice Garner Earth and Industry: Stories from Gippsland 176 Edited by Erik Eklund and Julie Fenley Don Garden Blockbuster: Fergus Hume & the Mystery of a Hansom Cab 178 By Lucy Sussex Elizabeth Morrison Fighting Hard: The Victorian Aborigines Advancement League 181 By Richard Broome Patricia Grimshaw An Imperial Affair: Portrait of an Australian Marriage 183 By John Rickard Judith Smart The War at Home: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, 185 Volume 4. By John Connor, Peter Stanley and Peter Yule Judith Smart Notes on Contributors 189 About the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 192 Guidelines for contributors 193 vi Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016 Introduction The creation of theVictorian Historical Journal is a collective effort but this particular volume has also crossed the desks of several editors on the path to publication. I am particularly grateful to the assistance and advice from Marilyn Bowler, Richard Broome and Judith Smart who, at different times, contributed their editorial and organizing skills to gift me an eminently smooth transition to the editorial chair at the beginning of this year. To them I say, thank you. The articles in this edition of the journal move from post-war Bonegilla to the swamps of Melbourne via a nineteenth-century legal landscape marked by the trial of the Eureka rebels. At the same time we see the faintly visible shadows cast by ex-convicts across respectable colonial society, either through their deliberate neglect in the historical record or their desire for anonymity. The settings for these stories show Victoria as a cog in the machinery of Empire and, later, as a destination for post-war European immigrants. Some of the places in which the events described took place are on the frontier of European conquest, others on the streets of Melbourne, and still others in mid–twentieth century rural Victoria. For readers of the Victorian Historical Journal, some of these topics cover familiar territory, from frontier conflict through the Eureka Rebellion, to the Burke and Wills expedition, and from Ned Kelly to post-war migration, but many of the narratives contain stories often told from unexpected perspectives. Rod Giblett considers the ways nineteenth-century European colonisers transformed and reimagined the lands of Aboriginal Victoria as sites of potential exploitation and transformation. He identifies how the Kulin nation’s rich wetlands on the northern shores of Port Phillip Bay were reconstructed or removed through the application of European technology driven by an unrelenting determination to tame a landscape identified as unruly and—in the case of Melbourne’s swamps—in need of improvement. While engineers and surveyors brought a European view of order to the physical landscape, a different type of order was applied at the Supreme Court when a jury acquitted the Eureka rebels of treason. Despite pressure from the judge, the jury found in favour of the rebels. In her reflection on the trials, Chief Justice Marilyn Warren brings a legal perspective to the decision, suggesting it was a measure of the 1 way the jury system kept a check on government power. While the disappearance of Melbourne’s wetlands diminished the natural wealth of the Kulin nation and their land, the decisions made by the jury at the Eureka trial bolstered the perception of the colony as a democratic and just place. Both events left a legacy that, in one case, was the equivalent of an environmental revolution in Melbourne’s natural history, while the other made a substantial contribution to the legal landscape of the country. Two further articles deal with place as a key component of stories about the past. Bruce Pennay’s article on the Bonegilla Reception Centre highlights how place-making is often at the centre of our relationship with the past, while David Corke revisits the more contentious aspects of the mythic narrative about the Burke and Wills expedition. Both authors demonstrate that the meeting of memory with place is never straightforward. David Corke’s meticulous investigation into the circumstances surrounding the location of ‘The Dig Tree’ reveals that, in the creation of colonial settlement narratives, the details often give way to the meaning attached to the events. The Bonegilla Reception Centre, by comparison, occupies a site that is central to the modern and continually evolving story of multicultural Australia. As Bruce Pennay suggests, memories of Bonegilla are held by those who lived there as well as people who lived in the adjacent towns. He suggests that Bonegilla’s heritage significance lies in the way it has become a symbol of social cohesion as the immigrants and native-born negotiated the uncertain pathway of coming to know each other. Peter Griggs provides a diversion from familiar historical topics in his consideration of the tea business in Melbourne in the years before the Great War, when Victorians were amongst the highest consumers of tea in the world and Melbourne was the centre of Australia’s tea trade. As the article suggests, tea was the democratic ‘drug of the day’, enjoyed across all levels of colonial society in urban and rural areas, in kitchens or around the campfire. At the same time, competition in the market ensured that advertising became a key part of the trade, its slogans entering the common language of the day. For example, Griffiths Bros tea advertising along railway lines was so embedded in the popular imagination that Mawson’s Antarctic expedition were photographed on the ice, drinking tea in front of a Griffiths Bros sign. 2 Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016 Thomas Rogers and Douglas Wilkie amplify the muted stories of colonial Victoria’s convict heritage in their articles dealing, in the first case, with the death of an unnamed shepherd in 1836 and, in the second, the life of ex-convict, Charles Brentani. In different ways the authors explore how the convicts and ex-convicts occupied the shadows of the colonial story. The shepherd, who was killed with his employer at Mt Cottrell to the west of Melbourne, was most likely a convict or an emancipist but neither this aspect of his life nor his name are known. As the article suggests, historians have discussed the two deaths in the context of frontier violence yet there is an overlooked additional narrative that tells the story of the deaths in the context of free settler attitudes to convict-class workers. While this incident may illustrate an active forgetting of the inconvenient part played by convicts in the early history of Port Phillip, ex-convicts such as Charles Brentani silenced the story of their convict origins as they created new lives in the colony.

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