Early history of Peterborough

Foreword

The history below covers the period leading up to the final acts of dispossession of the place that is Peterborough. The Baradh Gundidj, the Aboriginal people and custodians of all the lands which included Peterborough, were a part of the larger Kirrae Whurrong. The Kirrae Whurrong are one of the many peoples who comprise the Eastern Maar Nation which covers the area following the Great Ocean Road coastline and inland. and who as native title today recognises, remain custodians of the land.

The history below relies heavily on the work of Ken Clements in his time working with the Geoffrey Blainey Research Centre at Federation University, Ballarat. Over a period of many years in the early 2000s, Ken guided the Peterborough History Group and left them with a valuable resource in evidence that he had collated in order to explain the massacre that oral history tells us took place in Peterborough. This document guided the history written below.

The boundaries of the Baradh gundidj would have extended beyond the hamlet that Peterborough is today. They had close connections with their neighbours with whom they shared their language. When the first white settlement of British convicts and their officers and guards arrived in 1788, although this happened far away from Peterborough, the effects were probably felt in the new diseases which spread throughout the country and for which the indigenous people had no immunity: the impact of white settlement was felt before a white man reached Peterborough. The first white men in the Peterborough area, were sealers and whalers whose relations with the indigenous people had a history of violence. The effects of white settlement in the area was mixed, from the benevolence of Dr Curdie in what is now Cobden, to the brutality of the actions of pastoralists in the Camperdown area.   

The history below explores the impact of white settlement of Peterborough in the context of the key events of that time. Understanding the context in which key events took place, helps us to understand the impact of those events and why they happened. My purpose in writing this history, is to help us understand.

Barb Mullen
January 2025 

Baradh gundidj country

For tens of thousands of years, indigenous Australians lived and loved in our country. Theirs is the longest living, continuous culture of any peoples. Their culture was markedly different to how we live today, but like us they had families, friends and neighbours and they made decisions which made history.

Peterborough and the area around it are the lands of the Baradh gundidj – a clan who belonged to the larger grouping, the Kirrae Whurrung. The Kirrae Whurrung lands stretched from Lake Bolac and Mt Emu Creek in the north, to Camperdown in the east; the western edge was the Hopkins River up to Mt Hamilton, and they stretched from the Western Otways at Gellibrand River to the Hopkins. The Kirrae Whurrung are a part of the Eastern Maar nation.
 

Middens still visible today are evidence of the importance of the Peterborough coastline to the Baradh gundidj. Indigenous people, with their depth of knowledge of seasons and eco systems, knew when a particular foodstuff would be plentiful. They would gather at the same places every year and feast on the foods available. The middens are where the leftovers of their feasts were discarded, eg bones and shells. Inland from the coastline, today’s agricultural practices dominate, and middens have been lost over time – but along the coastline there are middens still to be found by those who know how to look.

In those early times, the inlet at Peterborough was called Cudje Cudje Lagoon. Messmates up to 70 metres tall and Brown Stringy Barks up to 40 metres tall could be found just two kilometres north of Peterborough in what we called the Heytesbury Forest.  Just as today we gather to enjoy the summer at Peterborough, so would the Baradh gundidj: crayfish, shellfish, freshwater fish and eels in the estuary and river, ducks and hens and other birds and their eggs, bush tucker at hand and yams and more.

The Baradh gundidj have been custodians of the land for more than two thousand years. It is and was their responsibility to care for and protect the lands and waters and in return they benefitted from the life it gave them. Their culture and laws were part of a way of life for indigenous peoples that had lasted for tens of thousands of years. They had little to protect themselves from the advance of the colonisers and the impact of colonisation. The impact of this for the Baradh gundidj can be considered in three distinct periods of time: pre-1810; 1805 to mid-1830s; and 1830s onwards.   
 

Pre-1810: Rumours

Closer to Peterborough, in the early 1800s, the story of the man we know as Buckley would have trickled out to the Baradh gundidj. Buckley was an escaped convict who swam across Port Phillip Bay. He wandered west till he reached Airey’s Inlet where he stayed put to rebuild his strength. He was found by the Wallaranga clan of the Wathaurong people who took him under their wing for the next thirty-two years. In 1835, Buckley made contact with the early settlers of what was then called Port Phillip. He persuaded his Wathaurong community not to attack the Englishmen, he would have known of massacres and the treatment meted out to the Aboriginal peoples, he knew they could not win against guns.

Buckley, still officially a convict, was soon given a pardon; he acted as a translator for John Batman, then the government, before eventually settling in Tasmania. He had been married to an Aboriginal woman from Buninyong, Purramurnin Tallarwurnin, with whom he had a daughter. He left them behind.

The Baradh gundidj would have heard of Buckley and the stories that were told; they would know about the strange, fair skinned people who were settling on their lands decades before they settled in the colony of Port Phillip. They would have wondered what this would mean for them and probably hoped it would all just go away.

1805 – 1830: The first face to face violence

In 1805 there are written reports of sealers from Sydney along the Peterborough coastline: they were fishing in the Cudje Lagoon (the Curdies inlet). This would be the first recorded contact for the Baradh gundidj.

Prior to the expansion of the whaling industry, sealers were active and they also hunted for mutton birds. Interactions between these men and the Indigenous populations were fraught. The work of Indigenous women especially, was integral to the success of these industries; the women were also used for sexual purposes. These women were often abducted. The recorded history of the sealing, mutton bird and then whaling industries along the south-west coast of Victoria is scant, unlike in the neighbouring states of NSW, SA and Tasmania. It is recorded in those neighbouring states that sealing and whaling were important to Aboriginal Australians and it was the source of conflict between them and the sealers and whalers.
 

These men were lawless adventurers. In Peterborough, they would behave as they had behaved elsewhere. We could fairly assume they were not welcomed here by the Baradh, we could also assume that these men helped themselves to whatever they wanted.

1830 – occupation and takeover

In 1830 Peterborough was land reserved for the Aboriginal people by the decision of the NSW government in Sydney.

Meanwhile the second smallpox epidemic possibly reached the Baradh gundidj by 1831. Dawson a colonist recorded in 1881 that people west of Port Fairy and on the coast had been severely affected. And Buckley made reference to a disease that could have been smallpox. Again however, the lack of verifiable evidence leaves the question open.

Bay of Martyrs

Along the Peterborough coastline is the Bay of Martyrs. And where does its name come from? In 1832, a French explorer mapped a feature referred to as Cape Martyr near today’s Bay of Martyrs. Given that naming of geographic features is usually based on people or events, we can assume that people gave their lives here in an event prior to or in 1832. An event significant enough to be recorded on the landscape, but not recorded in official documents. The Baradh gundj would have understood what the presence of a white man meant to them.

In Aboriginal groups the stories of what had happened are passed down in their oral traditions. The colonisers’  unwillingness to record the violence created an attitude of silence that served to protect the perpetrators of that violence.

In 1905, reminiscing upon the recent death of King Cocacoine of Colac, Caleb Collyer wrote: ‘I loved those dark skinned folk and of their early treatment I have a fair knowledge but refrain to tell the stories known to me for various reasons — I grieve to think that men of my own race could do to any one such things that I have unfortunately beheld (let others tell the tale I cannot)’ (Collyer 1905).

Convincing Ground Massacre

About 1833 or 1834, in Portland, the Convincing Ground Massacre took place. About five years earlier, whalers had settled in Portland and, as to be expected, tensions between these whalers and the local Gunditjmara peoples were high. When a whale beached, it was claimed by the Kilcarer gundidj, a clan of the Gunditjmara, but the whalers determined to use this opportunity to convince the indigenous peoples otherwise. The numbers killed are between 60 to 200 people – only two men of the Kilcarer gundidj survived. The survivors names were Pollikeunnuc and Yarereryarerer and they were adopted by the Cart Gundidj of nearby Mt Clay. If any whalers died, it remains unknown.

The shock of this massacre would have been felt by the Baradh gundidj soon after. The boundary of the Kirrae Whurrung lands was shared with the Gunditjmara –  they were neighbours. One can only imagine the impact of this massacre on the Baradh gundidj. It left them with the question: what would they do? What could they do?

Australia Felix

In 1835-6, Major Mitchell surveyed western Victoria, naming it Australia Felix in recognition of the beauty of the country. Today we understand that the beauty and the fertility of the lands were because of the land management practices of the Indigenous peoples. As custodians of the land they had for thousands of years developed the practices that kept the land and the waters in optimal condition. These good reports meant that speculators, adventurers and squatters were already venturing west (from what is now Melbourne), eager to acquire pastures for sheep and cattle.

Throughout the lands of the Kirrae Whurrung, it is acknowledged that a sustained guerilla war was conducted over the 1830s and 1840s, as indigenous lands were encroached upon. As the land was taken over, the Kirrae Whurrung lost their hunting grounds and local sources of foods, leading to starvation which in turn prompted the theft of sheep and subsequent reprisals. From 1837 a severe drought that lasted four years also had an impact on everyone.

In 1838, within thirty kilometres of Peterborough, squatters Hamilton and Watson occupied forty thousand acres southwest of Terang.

Murdering Gully

In the winter of 1839, a gully at Mt Emu Creek, in the northern reaches of Kirrae Whurrung country, Puuroyup (now Glenormiston), earned its name: Murdering Gully. There were about fifty of the Tarnbeere gundidg of the Djargurd Whurrung camped: men, women and children.  Station manager Frederick Taylor lead a vigilante group of locals, including James Hamilton and Broomfield and employees to the gully. They slaughtered at least forty people.  A young woman called Bareetch Chuumeen shook off her pursuers by swimming across Lake Bullen Merri with her child on her back.  She and the other survivors brought their story to the public gaze.

Neil Black bought Glenormiston in January 1840, writing: ‘the blacks have been very troublesome on it and I believe they have been very cruelly dealt with . . . The poor creatures are now terror stricken and will be easily managed. This was my principle [sic] reason for fighting so hard for it . . . I could not stand the thought of murdering them, and to tell the truth I believe it impossible to take up a new run without doing so, at least the chances are 50 to one’ (4 and 18 January 1840). Black made sure that any mia mias (Aboriginal shelters) were destroyed and gunpowder was left there to warn any survivors.

Dispossession continues

Prominent early settler Dr Daniel Curdie arrived on land he had secured south of Camperdown, near Cobden. He called it Tandarook. Tandarook was named after the ‘native bread’ fungus which grew prolifically. It was where the local clan welcomed the Baradh gundidj for an annual feast when the fungi was in season. As a practising physician, Dr Curdie would have been well aware of the consequences of the dispossession of the lands upon the Kirrae Whurrung. He had a positive reputation as a ‘protector’ of the Kirrae Whurrung who would seek refuge at Tandarook.  

Meanwhile, other means to rid the land of the Aboriginal people were practised. In his 1839 journal, Assistant Protector William Thomas included an extract from an overlander named Hill regarding his experience of the disposition of squatters towards Aborigines. Hill reported that in ‘nine cases out of ten [the attitude] was that of enmity, in more stations than one, three or four he could mention where they openly avowed their willingness to destroy them . . . at many of the stations blacks would not partake of bread, flour or milk [from fear of poisoning]’ (Thomas papers, vol 22).

In 1839, the Allan brothers occupied land from the east coast of the Hopkins River to Childers Cove, Tooram Run, a total of twenty-one square miles.  

Gunaward gundidj murders

There were many other murders and skirmishes. The consequences of one reached the Supreme Court in 1841. In this case, two Gunaward gundidj people were killed after crossing the Hopkins River while en route to the Protectorate station eleven miles away at Lake Terang. G.S. Bolden was put on trial for the murders, and acquitted. The acquittal was acquitted based on the argument that squatters had licences to turn anyone off their properties. This was in direct contravention of the government’s official position, that Aboriginal people had the right to access their lands for hunting and traditional purposes.

In 1842 L Walker became the first licensee of what was called the Buckley Creek Run,  70,000 acres including Peterborough. Subsequent licensees up until the 1860s included Dance, Hoyle, Wilson, Stanhope, Craig, McCreddin and Thwaites.
 

1843 massacre

1843 was a momentous year. The nearby Jancourt station was leased by Daniel MacKinnon. Whalers were active along the coastline and passenger and cargo ships were frequently passing. The peaceful life of the Baradh gundidj was shaken by the events of the previous decades; they were struggling to adapt to the threat to their existence and meanwhile they did what they could to live according to their law and care for their lands.

It was in the Spring of 1843 that the Peterborough massacre took place, allegedly by men from the Port Fairy district. The widely accepted story is that the men of the Baradh gundidj were thrown off the cliffs and the women and children were killed in the nearby swamps.  We remember this today in the name of Massacre Bay. There is no official record of the event; we do not know the numbers of the Baradh gundidj murdered; we can only assess what occurred and how many were massacred based on previous similar events and the consequences of those events. That this was called a massacre and not murder, gives a sense of the enormity of the event.

None of the Baradh Gundidj visited Tandarook for two years following the massacre. Every year they had celebrated the return of the ‘native bread’ fungi with the other clans of the Kirrae Whurrung. So, when Dr Curdie walked to Peterborough from Tandarook in 1845, he might well have been looking for the survivors. That he found none doesn’t mean there were none. None of the survivors would have been living a normal life after such an event.

Port Phillip District Superintendent Charles LaTrobe visited Peterborough with J. Allan from the nearby run Tooram, in 1846. It was he who suggested the name of Cudje Cudje Creek and Lagoon be changed to Curdies River in recognition of Dr Curdie’s walk from Tandarook the year before. He also acknowledged in his annual report that a group of very loose men had passed through Peterborough in October 1843 from Port Fairy en route to Johanna and back again. Noting this event is significant and his description of the men as loose is ominous. It was often men employed by landowners and would-be landowners who carried out the wishes of their employers. Taylor from Murdering Gully made a fortune doing just that, 'clearing the land'.

Surveyors consolidate history and murder in Aire River

George Smythe was surveying the coastline in 1846. He noted the location of the Bay of Martyrs arcing from the Bay of Islands to Halladale Point with Massacre Bay in the centre and identified the edge of the Buckley Creek Run with headquarters at Wallaby Creek, east of the Curdies estuary. George Smythe was not a stranger to the violence of the frontiers. When one of his surveyors tried to abduct an Aboriginal woman, the surveyor was killed by the indigenous people of the Aire River, east of Peterborough, where they camped. Smythe subsequently made a special return trip to the Aire River and killed eight to twenty of the indigenous people of the area in retaliation.

No longer governed from Sydney, the Victorian government was busy consolidating land ownership and conducting land sales. Peterborough became the Parish of Narrawaturk. Narrawaturk may have been the Aboriginal word for ‘hair-lip’ based upon the shape of the Curdies inlet. However, it just might be that ‘narawa’ means fresh water spring and ‘tarnuk’ means drinking well.

The aftermath

James Meek from Warrnabool built a hut on the west bank of the estuary in 1855 as a base for fishing and eeling and for his forays into the Otways looking for gold. Warrnambool itself had been established in 1847.

Voters in the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1855 included Charles Brown, Matthew McCreddin, Phillip Stanhope and Alexander Robertson representing Peterborough; women and Aboriginal people could not vote. This was the year that the Schomberg was wrecked just off main beach.

By 1860 James Meek left Peterborough and there were no permanent residents left, but he did return in four years with his two sons. In the years ahead, the land ownership legislation began to change, gradually transferring control of land from squatters and pastoralists to smaller selectors. In 1862 in response to an official request to know the numbers of Aboriginal peoples in the area, J. Allan estimated: Heytesbury 18, Hampden 63, Villiers including Warrnambool 126. How accurate would this figure have been? Survivors of the massacres and other atrocities would not have been eager for contact with the settlers.  

Finalising dispossession

In 1864 the township of Peterborough was defined. There is more than one suggestion for the origins of the name. A common belief is that it was chosen by the surveyors, who thought the marshy areas of our Peterborough were similar to those near Peterborough in England.

W. Irvine and his family arrived at Peterborough and settled on allotment 118 between the Bay of Islands and Crofts Bay.

J. Dance purchased allotments and established a large cattle station west of the river and north of the inlet. He erected cattleyards in the sandhills.

In 1865 Williams, Meek and Foote rowed up the Curdies River for two days, finding their way north.

The dispossession of the Baradh gundidj of their lands was complete.

Framlingham

In 1865 the Framlingham mission was established. Many of the Kirrae Whurrung sought refuge there along with the surviving Djargurd Wurrung whose lands neighboured the Kirrae Whurrung to the west, and the Warrnambool Gunditjmara. Buckley’s daughter Purramurnin Tallarwurnin lived there too. The Gunditjmara of Portland and Lake Condah refused to relocate and eventually the Lake Condah mission was established. Then in 1867, the Framlingham Mission was closed, and the people were expected to settle in Lake Condah. This did not sit comfortably with the Kirrae Whurrung and soon, in 1868, Framlingham was reopened.

By 1872, Fanny Curdie, wife of Dr Curdie, wrote from her home at Tandarook: “The natives here have almost disappeared from this district & there are none at the sea coast, where we go for change in summer & where they must have at one time been numerous in summer—so much have [sic.] civilisation done for them.” (Fanny (Frances) Curdie to her nephew, Rev. James Russell, Tandarook, 5 October 1872, [Curdie Papers] MS 8664, Box 942/b(2) SLV.)

“The physical sites of the Aborigines’ age-old occupation of this land—mia mias, stone fish traps, earthen mounds, stone arrangements, campsites, stone wells, axe grinding stones, scarred trees, and middens—were clearly visible to and recorded by the early settlers. Much of this physical evidence has since been lost, however, due to land clearing, building methods, and changing land-use patterns, but also due to the destructive ways of some of the settlers, who had intentionally destroyed or removed Aboriginal heritage. Aboriginal mounds, found near lake banks in western Victoria, have been levelled. “(Jan Critchett, Untold Stories: Memories and lives of Victorian Kooris, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 1998, p. 118.)

Today

On March 2023 the Federal Court of Australia recognised the Eastern Maar peoples native title of the traditional lands of the Eastern Maar, which includes the lands of the Kirrae Whurrung and the Baradh gundidj.

Sources:

Bonwick, James: “William Buckley – the wild white man and his Port Phillip Friends”. Melbourne 1856.

Clark Ian D. “Scars in the Landscape – a register of massacre sites in the western Victoria, 1803-1859” Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1995.

Clements, Ken. “Peterborough Timeline” unpublished paper held by the Peterborough Historical Group.

Dowling, P. “Fatal Contact. How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia's First Nation Peoples” 2021

Dowling, P. "A Great Deal of Sickness - Introduced diseases among the Aboriginal People of colonial Southeast Australia 1788-1900” ANU 2017 (thesis)

Eldridge R. “The Cultural Interaction of Aborigines with Whales, Whalers and Whaling in southwest Victoria 1828-1850. Federation University Australia, 2015.

Saunders, Walter: Narrawong History and Local Author Forum, June 2017

Tonkin and Westbrook: “Corangamite Heritage Study Stage 2 – Vol 2, Reviewed and Revised Thematic Environmental History.” Corangamite Shire Council, October 2009.

Map of Peterborough - by Ken Clements

Key

1. Childers Cove
2. The Cove
3. Murnane Bay
4. Sandy Bay (Dog Trap Bay?)
5. Buckley Creek
6. Viviennes Lookout
7. Stanhope Bay
8. Buttress Bay
9. Burnies Beach
10. Armstrong Creek
11. Flaxman Hill

Key cont.

12. Antares Rock
13. Lovers Nook
14. Bay of Islands
15. Cape Martyr
16. Crofts Bay
17. Little Massacre Bay?
18. Massacre Bay
19. Massacre Hill
20. Worm Bay
21. Bay of Martyrs
22. Halladale Point

Key cont.

23. The Well
24. Wild Dog Cove
25. James Irvine Monument
26. Peterborough
27. Curdies Inlet
28. Squirrel Creek
29. Wallaby Creek
30. Boggy Creek
31. Whiskey Creek
32. Curdies River
33. Pioneer Beach

Key cont.

34. Schomberg Rock
35. Young Australian
36. The Spit
37. Crown of Thorns
38. Newfield Bay
39. The Grotto
40. London Bridge
41. Point Hesse
42. High Cliffs
43. The Arch
44. Great South Land; New Holland; Terra Australis; Terre Napoleon; Portland Bay District; Victoria 1851; Australia 1901.