Indigenous People of Barfold

Customary Warning: Aboriginal viewers should be aware that this article may contain culturally sensitive material – including names of people who have since died.

In a previous article about Barfold Gorge[1], I wondered why we didn’t inherit any stories about how my great great grandfather got along with the Aborigines. New information indicates that, when he arrived at Barfold in the 1840s, the Aboriginal population had already been decimated.

John McNaughton sailed from Greenock, Scotland, on 17 May 1838, with his wife Agnes and daughter Jane and arrived in Port Jackson on 26 September [2]. Jobs were scarce and they departed Sydney on 17 December, arriving in Port Phillip on 3 January 1839. John was hired by Thomas Watt who built and operated the first punt across the Yarra River. In Sydney, John had been described as a gardener, and later worked at Heidelberg, an agricultural settlement far in the Victorian bush. In the 1840s he traveled further into the interior and worked for Mr. (later Sir) William Henry Fancourt Mitchell, who was “making his place” at Barfold on the Campaspe River, north of Kyneton.

With money saved John returned to Melbourne, settled in West Melbourne on land he purchased, invested in working horses, became a carter and, after gold was discovered in 1851, took goods to Bendigo. Five of the children were baptized at Scots Church on 22 June 1851. I wondered how John, Agnes and the children related to the indigenous people of Barfold, way out in the country. John also made those long trips from Melbourne to Bendigo, which would have taken days. I found no information in family records that gave a clue.

MASSACRE

In October 2018 Tony Faithfull e-mailed [3]:

“I came across your article on Barfold Gorge. In it you pose the question of the dynamics of the clash of cultures. Prior to Mitchell acquiring Barfold, it was squatted on by others. There was clearly no love lost between the Aboriginal people and the first settlers, with the Aborigines inflicting injuries and killing two shepherds, casual killings of Aborigines by the shepherds, and a massacre of 23 of them after they stole a large flock of sheep. The massacre seems to have happened initially in Barfold Gorge, but then subsequently a further 6-40 were massacred near Rochester. I am embarrassed to say John Coppock was my 3rd great uncle. Although I am not confident of all of the detail in the article in “The Australasian” (as the story was recounted by John Coppock’s nephew John Coppock White after John Coppock’s death) I think they had no reason to exaggerate their mistreatment of the Aborigines. So Mitchell might have had no trouble with Aborigines, but if so it would have been because by then they had already been decimated.”

This was disturbing news, but it helped explain the lack of reference to Aborigines in our family records. “The Australasian” article [4] says John Coppock came to Port Jackson a free emigrant in 1829. He formed a partnership with a capitalist called Yaldwin who wanted to secure a tract of country in Port Phillip for pastoral purposes. Coppock led an expedition to Port Phillip in 1837. They pitched camp on Piper’s Creek and Coppock named the camp ‘Barfold’, after a place of similar name in his native country of England (there is a town called Barfold in Suffolk). A lease to occupy was obtained from New South Wales. Aborigines started spearing sheep for the inside fat and they wounded three shepherds at different times. Some of the twenty-one assigned servants in Coppock’s party were in the habit of shooting blacks in his absence. One day he discovered a shepherd and watchman in an out-station speared and clubbed to death and 1,200 young wethers gone and other sheep dead. Coppock took his remaining nineteen men and decided to give the blacks a lesson they would never forget. Twenty-three were slaughtered and some sheep were recovered. Coppock sent a report of the incident to the head of police in Melbourne and the whole party was summoned to Sydney. The venture at Barfold was wound up, leaving available the property, which fell to William Mitchell, for whom John McNaughton went to work in the 1840s.

The massacre at Barfold was followed by another in June 1838. The following most likely account is pieced together from various reports [5]. Some sheep were stolen from a station belonging to Captain Charles Hutton on the Campaspe Plains. Two employees may have been killed. When the sheep were found at present day Rochester, sixty miles (97km) north of Barfold, many had been killed and more had their legs broken to prevent their straying. A neighboring squatter, W. H. Yaldwyn [Coppock’s capitalist partner at Barfold] called on soldiers and mounted police to search for the offenders. Word was sent to Captain G. B. Smyth, who was encamped with a small detachment of troopers from the 28th Regiment at Soldiers’ Flat on the Campaspe, near Barfold [The 28th Regiment of the British Army from North Gloustershire served in Victoria 1835-42 and was sent to India after the First Anglo-Afghan War 1839-42]. A reprisal party for stock theft was led by Sergeant Dennis O’Leary. No attempt was made to discover the culprits. The troopers opened fire on the first Aboriginal people to cross their path, about 112 km (70 miles) from where Hutton’s servants were supposedly killed. At least six Aborigines were killed, and possibly as many as forty – the entire group except one woman and a child. Their language was Dja Dja Wurrung, the language of the Djaara. Hutton gained a very bad reputation for his treatment of Aboriginal people.

In a follow-up email [6] Tony Faithfull suggested that the initial attack on the Coppock party may not have been staged by the Djaara but by the Goulburn River Tribe, who seemed to be more militantly resisting the settlers. In any case, the military reprisal seems to have been against the Djaara. The article in “The Australasian” was written by the nephew of John Coppock but references no sources. It is ostensibly an account related by John Coppock to his nephew, John Coppock White, and may have been inflated or inaccurate. However, there is an unusual degree of credible detail, including uncomplimentary references to the settlers. Since a full report was made to the Melbourne police and relayed to the authorities in Sydney, this story in “The Australasian” could have been checked against the records, but we don’t know if it was. A further twist is that Tony Faithfull says a convict named John Coppock arrived in the same year the subject of the story claims to have arrived. Even if we can’t be sure the story of the Barfold massacre is true in all aspects, it is a useful focus for the tragic pattern of events that decimated the aboriginals of this area, which suggests that John McNaughton and his family may not have had much contact with indigenous people in the 1840s.

DJAARA

The Djaara belong to a tribe that occupied the watersheds of the Loddon and Avoca rivers in the Bendigo region of central Victoria, part of the Kulin alliance of tribes, with 16 clans [7]. There is evidence that smallpox, perhaps introduced first from the north by Macassan traders, swept through the Djaarra in 1789 and 1825, which would have decimated the population at the time. According to a census undertaken in 1840, there were 282 Djaara, all that remained of the 900 – 1,900 people estimated to be in Djaara territory at the time the explorer Thomas Mitchell passed through their territory, the first white man to do so, in 1836.

The European settlement of Western Victoria in the 1830s and 1840s was marked by resistance to the invasion, often by the driving off of sheep, which then resulted in conflict and sometimes a massacre of aboriginal people. Neil Black, a squatter in Western Victoria writing on 9 December 1839, states the prevailing attitude of many settlers: “The best way (to procure a run) is to go outside and take up a new run, provided the conscience of the party is sufficiently seared to enable him without remorse to slaughter natives right and left. It is universally and distinctly understood that the chances are very small indeed of a person taking up a new run being able to maintain possession of his place and property without having recourse to such means – sometimes by wholesale . . .” Edward Parker expressed in 1842 the “firm conviction . . . that nine out of ten outrages committed by the blacks” derived either directly or indirectly from sexual relations. While he considered the “labouring classes” the worst offenders, he also indicated there were “individuals claiming the rank of gentleman and even aspiring to be administrators of the law” who abused Aboriginal women.

Edward Stone Parker was appointed in England by the Colonial Office as an Assistant Protector of Aborigines in the Aboriginal Protectorate established in the Port Philip district under George Robinson. He arrived in Melbourne in January 1839, with Robinson appointing Parker to the north-west or Loddon District in March. He did not start his protectorate until September 1839. The Protector’s duties included to safeguard aborigines from “encroachments on their property, and from acts of cruelty, of oppression or injustice” and a longer term goal of “civilizing” them. Parker’s original choice for a reserve in September 1840 was a site, known as Neereman by the Djaara, on Bet Bet Creek, a tributary of the Loddon River. However, the site proved unsuitable for agriculture and in January 1841 Parker selected a site on the northern side of Mount Franklin on Jim Crow Creek with permanent spring water.

Trent Nelson, Chair of the Board of Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation,
celebrates entering into a Recognition and Settlement Agreement
with the State of Victoria at a Yapenya, November 2013.

This was an extraordinary choice. John Ross [8] relates that ‘Jim Crow’ is a corruption of jumcra, the aboriginal name for the area. Parker mentions the name in his report of 22 September 1839. But Jim Crow was a stage character created in 1828 by a travelling white minstrel called Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who used to blacken his face (as Al Jolson did a century later). By 1830 the Jim Crow character had become his signature act. Rice was very popular and toured extensively in North America. He was known in England too. He was mentioned in “The Times” in 1833, toured England in 1836, and married there in 1837. Why Rice chose that name is the subject of debate; perhaps it was the name of an old black slave or a ragged black stable boy. It became synonymous with black Americans and other racial groups considered inferior at the time in American society. So it is likely that English settlers in the Colony who had been to the theatre back home would know of the character and would associate the phrase with black people. Upon hearing the local Aborigines use the term jumcra, one can speculate how they might easily arrive at the corruption ‘Jim Crow.’

Rice’s famous stage persona eventually lent its name to a generalized negative and stereotypical view of black people. The shows peaked in the 1850s, and after Rice’s death in 1860 interest in them faded. There was still some memory of them in the 1870s however, just as segregation laws were surfacing in the United States. The ‘Jim Crow’ period, which started when segregation rules, laws and customs surfaced after the Reconstruction era ended in the 1870s, existed until the mid-1960s when the struggle for civil rights in the United States gained national attention. The Jim Crow character portrayed African-Americans as lazy, stupid, inherently less human and unworthy of integration. This led white Americans to have a negative view of African-Americans in both their character and their work ethic. Many performers imitated Rice’s use of blackface and toured the United States, spreading racist overtones and ideas perpetuated by the character.

It’s extraordinary to think that a white vaudeville performer from Manhattan created a character in the 1830s that had such a poisonous effect on white perceptions of blacks, which endures to this day. And almost more extraordinary to find that the concept was cemented into a Central Victorian shelter selected for the Djaara almost simultaneously, in the 1830s, twelve thousand miles away, by a man who was selected to protect them. Franklinford was sited on the Jim Crow Creek. There were attempts to rename it ‘Jumcra Creek,’ but ‘Jim Crow’ would have been easier for the whites, and the Djaarra may have even heard it the same way. Both sides could have been ignorant of the wider significance of the name.

The site was chosen with the support of the Djaara as well as Crown Lands Commissioner Frederick Powlett. Approval for the site was given in March, and a large number of Djaara accompanied Parker there in June 1841 when the station was established on William Mollison’s Coliban run, where an outstation hut already existed. This became known as the Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate Station at Franklinford, and the area was known to the Djaara as Larne-ne-barramul or the habitat of the emu, forty-three miles (69km) southwest of Barfold. Franklinford provided a very important focus for the Djaara during the 1840s, where they received a measure of protection and rations, but they continued with their traditional cultural practices and semi-nomadic lifestyle as much as they could.

Parker also attempted to prosecute those European settlers who had killed aborigines, including Henry Monro and his employees for killings in January 1840 and William Jenkins, William Martin, John Remington, Edward Collins and Robert Morrison for the murder of Gondiurmin in February 1841. Both cases were thrown out of court due to the inadmissibility of aboriginal witness statements and evidence in Courts of Law. Aboriginals were regarded as heathens, unable to swear on the bible, and therefore unable to give evidence. This made prosecution of settlers for crimes against aborigines exceedingly difficult, while also making it very difficult for aborigines to offer legal defenses when they were prosecuted for such crimes as sheep stealing. The colonial Government severely curtailed funding to the protectorate from 1843. It ended on 31 December 1848, with about 20 or 30 Djaara living on the station at that time.

While frontier conflict, murder and massacre took their toll, the impact of disease had a far greater impact. From the late 1830s European contact introduced tuberculosis, venereal disease, the common cold, bronchitis, influenza, chicken pox, measles and scarlet fever. Venereal diseases of syphilis and gonorrhea reached epidemic proportions, with estimates of 90 per cent of Djaara women thought to be suffering from syphilis by late 1841. This also had the effect of rendering aboriginal women infertile and infecting any infants born, causing high infant mortality and a plummeting birthrate. By December 1852 the population of Djaara was estimated at 142 people, whereas they had numbered between one and two thousand just 15 years previously at time of first contact [this would have been in 1837, just before the McNaughtons left Scotland].

The onset of the Victorian Gold Rush in 1851 placed further pressure on the Djaara, when 10,000 diggers occupied Barkers Creek and Mount Alexander and many streams turned into alluvial gold diggings, with many sacred sites violated. The gold rush also caused a crisis in agricultural labor, so many of the squatters employed Djaara people as shepherds, stock-riders, station hands and domestic servants on a seasonal or semi-permanent basis. Many of those that could not find work with the squatters survived on the margins of white society through begging and prostitution for food, clothes and alcohol. The availability of alcohol increased with the number of bush inns and grog shanties associated with the diggings and drunkenness became a serious problem. Mortality rates worsened during the gold rushes. 

On 28 March 2013, the State of Victoria and the Djaara people entered into a Recognition and Settlement Agreement under the Victorian government’s Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010, which formally recognizes the Djaara people as the traditional owners for part of Central Victoria [9]. The agreement area extends from north of the Great Dividing Range near Daylesford and includes part or all of the catchments of the Richardson, Avon, Avoca, Loddon and Campaspe Rivers. It includes, among other things, Crown land in the City of Greater Bendigo, Lake Boort and part of Lake Buloke. The agreement was the culmination of eighteen months of negotiations between the Victorian Government and the Djaara people and settles title claims dating back to 1998. The Recognition statement forms a good introduction to the history, culture, feelings and status of the Djaara and their country [10].

REFERENCES:

1. McNaughton, Ken, Barfold Gorge, Port Phillip Pioneers Group Newsletter, Vol. 38, No. 4 Aug-Sep., 2015 and Vol. 39, No. 1, Feb-Mar 2016.

2. McNaughton, Ken, Bergmeier, Diane, and Bergmeier, Neville, “John Ross McNaughton (1814-1885): His family, descendants and historic properties,” 22 July 2010.

3. Faithfull, Tony, e-mail to Ken McNaughton, 16 October 2018.

4. White, John Coppock, “Old Time Memories: Trials and Experiences of a Pioneer,” “The Australasian,” 31 October 1885, courtesy of the National Library of Australia, Trove.

5. “Massacre at Campaspe Plains,” Colonial Massacres in Central and Eastern Australia 1788-1930, The Centre for 21st Century Humanities, The University of Newcastle, Australia.

6. Faithfull, Tony, e-mail to Ken McNaughton, 1 December 2018.

7. Wikipedia, “Djadjawurrung,” 10 November 2018; this section contains selected verbatim quotes from Wikipedia about the Djaara.

8. Ross, John, “Where did the name ‘Jim Crow’ come from?,” Yandoit.net – Community website for Yandoit, Clydesdale and Franklinford, 13 July 2012.

9. Recognition and Settlement Agreement between the State of Victoria and the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans, 28 March 2013 Feb 2024: link no longer works.

10. Recognition Statement, Dja Dja Wurrung Clans, 2016.

NOTES:

I am grateful to Alexander Romanov-Hughes, who encouraged me to add art; and to Barbara Huggins, General Manager, and Trent Nelson, Chair of the Board, Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Corporation, 1/70 Powells Avenue, Bendigo, Victoria, 3552, Australia, for permission to reproduce images from their website.

Contributed by Ken McNaughton ( PPPG Member No. 1061 )

© COPYRIGHT This work is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any medium without written permission from Ken McNaughton, 3778 College Avenue, Ellicott City, MD 21043; phone/fax: 410-418-9340; kjmcn@comcast.net (10 November 2018).