The Western District is a region of Australia located in the south-west corner of the state of Victoria, extending to Ballarat in the east and as far north as Ararat where it borders the Wimmera region. To the south, the district extends to Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean and to the west it extends to the South Australian border. The district is well-known for the production of wool.
The principal centres of the district are: Warrnambool, Hamilton, Colac, Portland, Casterton, Port Fairy, Camperdown, and Terang. Other cities and towns in or on the edge of the district include: Coleraine, Merino, Heywood, Dunkeld, Penshurst, Macarthur, Koroit, Allansford, Ararat, Willaura, Beaufort, Learmonth, Ballarat, Snake Valley, Skipton, Moyston, Linton, Derrinallum, Lismore, Mortlake, Noorat, Cobden, Timboon, Beeac, Cororooke, Birregurra, Apollo Bay, and Lorne.
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It consists of a nearly flat volcanic plain created by a number of quite recently active volcanoes, the best known being Mount Eccles, Mount Richmond and Mount Gambier. Whilst some of them (eg. Mount Richmond) have given rise to cemented pyroclastic rocks that do not produce fertile soils, others have given rise to fertile Andisols that make the region the best grazing land in Australia, as well as highly suitable for the production of vegetable crops. Away from the volcanoes, soils are of moderate to low fertility and many are sandy, supporting heathland flora like the Grampians. Drainage is very poor and most rivers flow only after prolonged periods of steady rain, resulting in remarkably variable flow when the low variability of the climate is taken into account. The major mountain range is the Otway Ranges, which are an ancient sedimentary range rising to over 600 metres.
The climate is mild to warm and generally humid to sub-humid. Summer temperatures are warm, ranging from 13 to 22 °C (55 to 72 °F) at Portland to 14 to 26 °C (57 to 79 °F) in the northern part of the plain. Rainfall in summer is not uncommon but is only rarely heavy; though in March 1946 astonishingly heavy rains of up to 300 millimetres (12 inches) in a week constitute easily the heaviest falls in the region. In winter, temperatures typically range from minima of around 5 °C (41 °F) to pleasant maxima of 14 to 15 °C (57 to 59 °F), and rainfall is very frequent and reliable, averaging from 55 millimetres (just over 2 inches) in the driest area around Lake Bolac to 110 millimetres (4.4 inches) near Portland and Port Campbell. In the Otway Ranges, summers are mild, averaging around 20 °C (68 °F), whilst winters are cold and very wet, with maxima averaging around 9 to 10 °C (48 to 50 °F) and rainfall averaging about 225 millimetres (8.9 in) with extremes in June 1952 as high as 538 millimetres (21.2 in) at Weeaproinah and a Victorian record 891 millimetres (35.1 in) at nearby Tanybryn.
See also: Gunditjmara People
The Western District was well-populated and owned by Victorian Aborigines at the time colonisation began. For example, the ancestors of the Gunditjmara people lived in villages of weather-proof houses with stone walls a metre high, located near eel traps and aquaculture ponds at Lake Condah and elsewhere - on just one hectare of Allambie Farm, archaeologists have discovered the remains of 160 house sites.[1]
In the early 19th century, whalers operating along the coast occasionally grew crops for their own use. Edward Henty settled Portland Bay in 1834.[2] Henty had "...little contact with the Aborigines even though the country inland from Portland Bay seems to have been thickly populated (one village Henty saw had fifty huts)." [3] Nevertheless, in December 1834, shortly after arriving from Tasmania, Henty (aged 24 yrs) set off for country inland from Portland, with resident whalers, an Aboriginal woman abducted by one of them and 14 hunting dogs (a cross between greyhounds and wolfhounds). On spotting a single Aboriginal man, as Henty recorded "...the Men set the Dogs on" him.[4]
Both the Henty brothers and Captain Griffiths (who settled at Port Fairy in 1836), combined whaling and farming. The district was explored by Thomas Mitchell in 1836 who identified the area's potential for grazing. Charles Tyers was the first to survey the area in 1839. Sheep were first brought to the district in 1836 by Thomas Manifold at Port Henry, near Geelong, and rapidly occupied the whole district. By 1840 squatters occupied almost all the district.
With pastoral land in the colony of Van Diemen's Land fully allocated to colonists, John Batman turned his attention to mainland land speculation at the vast grasslands of Port Phillip Bay, which began in 1835 without the consent of the British Crown and at an enormous cost in the lives and livelihoods of its Aboriginal land-owners. With no legal recognition or protection of the Aboriginal land-owners, violence ensued. For example, in August 1836, Aborigines killed the squatter Charles Franks and an unnamed shepherd, at Franks' station on the Werribee River (near Melbourne). In response, Henry Batman (John Batman's brother) led an indiscriminate punitive expedition against 70–80 Aborigines (men, women & children) living in 9 large huts on the Werribee River, killing an unrecorded number.[5] In spite of this, in May 1837, Henry Batman "...was appointed acting Commissioner of Crown Lands, the official charged with overseeing the squatters."[6] Earlier, on 4 March 1837, Governor Bourke in his visit to Melbourne addressed 120 Aborigines, "...whom he exhorted...to good conduct and attention to the Missionary.' The Kulin were given blankets and four favoured men, who had been recommended for 'honorary distinctions' by [Police Magistrate Captain William] Lonsdale, were awarded brass plates."[7]
By 1839, large numbers of homeless, dispossessed Aborigines, refugees from surrounding pastoral districts, were "....surviving whenever and however they could on the geographic, social and economic margins of the town [ie, Melbourne]." [8] When Chief Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson arrived in the town in the winter of 1839, "four to five hundred blacks of the Port Phillip tribes" were gathering at a camp site on the south bank of the Yarra River, suffering hunger and disease.[9] By 1840, Robinson still "....had no stores allocated to him..." by Captain William Lonsdale (colonist), the Police Magistrate in Melbourne, even though "...it was patently obvious that the Aborigines were starving, and many were ill and near death,..."[10] With land in the hinterland overrun by "...vast numbers of sheep and cattle.." and "...conditions in the countryside becoming intolerable, the blacks swarmed into Melbourne looking for food and blankets."[11]
Clendinnen [12] describes the picture painted in 1841 by George Augustus Robinson on the grasslands of the Western District to the west of Melbourne (two years after John Batman's death), during a field trip from Melbourne to Portland via the Grampians:
What he sees troubles him deeply. In the rush to grab the land - to grab it from white competitors even more urgently than from its Aboriginal owners - blacks are being thrust off their tribal lands and left to starve. If they show the least resistance, if they spear a single sheep, whole mobs are likely to be murdered. The Law is elsewhere, in distant Melbourne. It offers no protection. Travelling through a specially tense region, Robinson makes only one journal entry for the day, but it is enough: 'All the shepherds I saw today have double-barrelled guns. The natives say, "By and by no good".He follows a trail of black complaints to the farm of a man called Francis. Francis blandly admits to having shot five blacks down by the river-they attacked him, he says, so he shot them, and later he shot another black he saw running from his sheepfold close by the homestead. Robinson finds the man's skull still lying where the body had fallen. He discovers that Francis has forbidden his black workers to touch the corpse. They have had to watch as it withered, as dogs worried at it and dragged most of it away, until only the skull is left. We can only imagine the terror - terror both of Francis, the alien psychopath with the gun, and of the unquiet spirit of the murdered man, unappeased by any ritual.
Robinson picks up the skull, puts it in his horse-drawn van, goes on his way. Closer to Melbourne he comes across an old [Aboriginal] woman wandering with what remains of her kin - a young man, a child - over land no longer hers, and sufficiently desperate to waylay this white man who speaks some of her language and who treats her gently. She dances a shuffling dance for him. It is the history of her country she is telling him through her dance. She sings its place names, and weeps for its loss.
In some regions the murderous phase is almost over, and there is a terrified peace. In one such place Robinson comes across an Aboriginal family: a man, his wife, a baby, two very young girls, He discovers they are from a group called Wol-lore-rer,[13] or what is left of it; the tribe they say, is 'plenty all gone', 'plenty shoot him white man'. Robinson suspects that the family have been allowed to survive only because the girls are being used sexually by local whites, a suspicion which is confirmed when he overhears the girls saying over their few words of English: 'Well done fuckmoll, go it fuckmoll, good night fuckmoll'
Between 1836 and 1842, Victorian Aboriginal groups were largely dispossessed of territory bigger than England.[14]
See also Murdering Gully massacre on Mount Emu Creek in the Western District.
In the Portland region in the 1840s, the Gunditjmara fought for their lands in a series of clashes known as the Eumerella Wars, in which both they and colonists experienced violent deaths. The Gunditjmara resistance became overwhelmed by the colonisers who brought in the Native Police.[15] The historian Jan Critchett has documented this conflict in her 1990 book, A distant field of murder: Western district frontiers, 1834-1848.[16]
The colonization of the Western District had huge impacts beyond the immediate region. By January 1844, there were said to be 675 Aborigines resident in squalid camps in Melbourne.[17] Although the British Colonial Office appointed 5 "Aboriginal Protectors" for the entire Aboriginal population of Victoria, arriving in Melbourne in 1839, they worked "...within a land policy that nullified their work, and there was no political will to change this."[18] "It was government policy to encourage squatters to take possession of whatever [Aboriginal] land they chose,....that largely explains why almost all the original inhabitants of Port Phillip's vast grasslands were dead so soon after 1835".[19] By 1845, fewer than 240 wealthy Europeans held all the pastoral licences then issued in Victoria and became the patriarchs "...that were to wield so much political and economic power in Victoria for generations to come."[20]
With the Aboriginal population dispossessed of their lands and their management of fire having been disrupted for almost 15 years, the Colony experienced for the first time its largest ever bushfires, burning about 25% of the land area of Victoria on Black Thursday (1851) on 6 February 1851.
Missionaries sought to relocate Gunditjmara people of the west to a mission established further east near Purnim in 1861, however, the Gunditjmara refused because of tension with Aboriginal people from the eastern boundary of Gunditjmara country and beyond the Hopkins River. Five years later in 1866, 2,043 acres of Crown land at Lake Condah was set aside for use as an Aboriginal mission. This land was gazetted as a reserve in 1869 and an Anglican mission was established. In 1951, the Lake Condah reserve, with the exception of three small areas was revoked and the land was handed over to the Soldiers Settlement Commission.[21]
In 1980, the Gunditjmara launched legal action in the Supreme Court of Victoria to prevent Alcoa of Australia Ltd from damaging or interfering with Gunditjmara cultural sites located on the same place as the proposed aluminium smelter at Portland. The Supreme Court dismissed their subsequent application for leave to appeal to the Federal Court. However, the Gunditjmara took the matter to the High Court of Australia where they were successful. High Court Chief Justice Gibbs judged that: "The appellants have an interest in the subject matter of the present action which is greater than that of other members of the public and indeed greater than that of other persons of Aboriginal descent who are not members of the Gournditch-jmara people. The applicants and other members of the Gournditch-jmara [ie, the Gunditjmara] people would be more particularly affected than other members of the Australian community by the destruction of the relics."[22]
On 30 March 2007, the Gunditjmara People were recognised by the Federal Court of Australia to be the native title-holders of almost 140,000 hectares of Crown land and waters in the Portland region.[23] On 27 July 2011, together with the Eastern Maar People, the Gunditjmara People were recognised to be the native title-holders of almost 4,000 hectares of Crown land in the Yambuk region, including Lady Julia Percy Island, known to them as Deen Maar.[24]
Wheat was grown in the drier northern part of the region for some time until more easily managed soils in the Wimmera were developed. Dairying was developed as a major industry in the wetter southern parts during this period, as was the cultivation of potatoes and onions on the best soils.
In the Otway Ranges, forestry became the major industry, especially after the building of the Great Ocean Road which opened up these very wet regions. Because of the change in focus since the late 1960s to woodchipping, many timber mills are now defunct as jobs have moved to Geelong. Tourism is the dominant industry in towns such as Lorne and Apollo Bay, which fill up during the summer as Melburnians are drawn by the stunning scenery and milder weather. In towns like Heywood and Nelson, pine plantations have been the dominant industry since the 1950s but the industry, even as plantations mature, is under threat due to poor prices.