VICTORIAN
HISTORICAL
JOURNAL
ISSUE 285
VOLUME 87, NUMBER 1
JUNE 2016
Royal Historical Society of Victoria
Victorian Historical Journal
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Front cover: South Melbourne showing the Robur Tea Building, c. 1927.
Courtesy State Library of Victoria.
The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of
Port Phillip’s Convicts
homas Rogers
Abstract
Squatter Charles Franks and his shepherd were brutally killed by
Aboriginal people in 1836 in the Port Phillip District. Free settlers
memorialised Franks as a gentleman and innocent victim of violence.
he shepherd, however, was barely remembered by free settlers at all.
Examining the atermath of the killings in free settler correspondence, this
article considers free settler portrayals of convicts, as well as notions free
settlers held about themselves. he reactions of Port Phillip’s free settlers
to the deaths conformed to prevailing practices and tropes deployed in
establishing the settlement’s social order.1
In July 1836, a squatter and a shepherd were killed by Aboriginal people
near Mount Cottrell in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.2
he backs of their heads had been struck with tomahawks with such
violence that their skulls had been pushed into the sot earth.3 One of
the men was Charles Franks, a free settler from Van Diemen’s Land who
had just crossed Bass Strait with sheep to take up land. he shepherd
was almost certainly a convict or emancipist, assigned to or employed
by Franks’ business partner, free settler George Armytage.4 Britons of
low station had been killed by Aboriginal people in the District before
this but Charles Franks was the irst free settler to fall victim to frontier
violence in Port Phillip. Ater the attack, a party of free settlers, some
of whom had known Franks, set out on a retaliatory raid against the
local Wathaurong people, though the details of this raid are diicult
to determine. Focusing on this raid, historians have used the story to
foreshadow the violence that was soon to be unleashed on the plains of
the District. In contrast to the usual emphasis on frontier violence, this
article turns attention to contemporary free settler descriptions of the
deaths themselves. Particular notice is paid to the diference in station
or class between the two men to illuminate some of the deliberately
forgotten aspects of Port Phillip’s early history.5 he story of Franks and
the shepherd describes one of the irst clashes in what was to become
117
a very violent frontier, but, as usually told, it is also emblematic of the
repeated forgetting of convicts in Port Phillip and Victorian history.
his forgetting occurred from the outset. Keen to distance themselves
from the convict taint of Sydney and Hobart, the very men who brought
convicts to the Port Phillip District omitted them from the record.
This article examines how colonial newspapers placed the
characters of Charles Franks and the shepherd within a colonial
hierarchy. I consider descriptions of the men’s bodies by the newspapers,
and by free settlers in their correspondence. Finally, the deaths will be
considered in the context of other incidents at around the same time
in other parts of New South Wales. Although an obscure incident, the
case of the killing of Franks and the shepherd sheds light on certain
conventions of language used in describing the violent deaths of
respectable men on the fringes of the colony. Perhaps these deaths were
memorialised because they occurred in the context of a war for land and
resources. But the incident also shows that the way Charles Franks was
remembered itted into a broader discourse that distinguished between
masters and men in colonial New South Wales. Scholars have examined
the language used to categorise and order Indigenous people and settlers
in the nineteenth century, but there is also scope to examine the ways the
free settlers of Australia diferentiated themselves from other settlers.6
Before looking closely at the killings, this article requires some
context. In common with other pastoralist incursions in the Australian
colonies from as early as the 1810s, Port Phillip was the site of a struggle
for control of land and water between incoming British squatters
and Indigenous landowners.7 he grasslands of Port Phillip, created
by generations of Aboriginal burning patterns, drew the attention of
squatters.8 John Batman himself inadvertently noticed this, commenting
that the plains of Port Phillip ‘appeared like land layed out in farms
for some 100 years back and every tree transplanted’.9 he pastoralists’
hard-hoofed sheep broke down riverbanks, caused soil erosion, and
compressed topsoil, causing the depletion of staple foods for Aboriginal
clans.10 his led Aboriginal hunters to spear sheep instead, which in
turn led to settler retribution that was oten extremely bloody. Charles
Franks and the shepherd were among the irst casualties of this war
for resources, and the rapid and brutal settler response to their deaths
foreshadowed many other such responses in Port Phillip.
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Since the 1970s, academic historians have given detailed attention
to the violence of the Australian frontier, acknowledging the Aboriginal
presence in settler histories and returning agency to Aboriginal groups
and individuals.11 A revisionist reaction in the late 1990s and early
2000s questioned that scholarship, suggesting it adhered to a needlessly
pessimistic or guilt-ridden understanding of Australian history, overtly
and inexcusably written with present-day political concerns in mind.12
hese claims were misleading because historians of the frontier had been
grappling with the problems of evidence and numbers of people killed
long before denial of frontier violence became a political subject.13 he
denialists nevertheless inspired historians to consider early events along
the frontier in closer detail, and to revisit questions about evidence and
the numbers killed in violence.14
Histories of the Port Phillip frontier have considered the killing
of Charles Franks and the shepherd within this framework of settler–
Aboriginal conlict. Since Franks was the irst free settler to be killed,
historians have presented his death as the inauguration of the violent
frontier in Port Phillip.15 In some senses, the killings set a pattern of
violence in Port Phillip, triggering the type of revenge attack that became
a recurrent feature of Australian frontier ighting.16 he retaliatory
party itself showed a settler tactic that would be used for the rest of the
nineteenth century—the arming of Aboriginal members of the party
to help track down foreign or enemy Aboriginal clans.17 As Alastair
Campbell noted, the leading members of the tiny free settler population
seemed to approve of the retaliation, or at least did not protest,
discrediting their claims to be interested in the welfare of Aboriginal
people.18 Building on these insights, the most recent work on Port Phillip
attempts to lesh out aspects of the settlement and free settler society in
addition to the settler–Aboriginal conlict.19 hough the death of Franks
is important for understanding aspects of the frontier, it also illuminates
prevailing free settler attitudes towards convict-class workers.
Many of the irst settlers of Port Phillip came from Van Diemen’s
Land and had experienced the lengthy conlict for land in that colony,
taking over almost all available grassland. By 1830, towards the end of
the settler takeover of Van Diemen’s Land, there were one million sheep
being grazed there.20 Looking for new pastures, the leader of the Port
Phillip Association (PPA), John Batman, attempted to purchase Kulin
land by treaty in 1835.21 he treaty was invalidated by New South Wales
Thomas Rogers – The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts
119
Governor Bourke, but a land rush had begun, and Bourke allowed
squatters to take up land in the District. hough not a member of the
PPA, Franks was among the irst of many stock owners to take part in
this frenetic rush to the District, arriving there on 25 May 1836.22 Along
with experience of conlict, Vandiemonian settlers like Franks brought
with them ideas about station or class—about convict-class workers and
their place in the new society.
Contemporaries tended to conflate serving convicts and exconvicts into one class. Exactly how many convicts were present in Port
Phillip during the 1830s and 1840s is hard to ascertain but historians
and contemporaries agree that they did form a signiicant proportion
of the rural working population. his proportion fell over time. A.G.L.
Shaw estimated that half of the male population comprised convicts or
ex-convicts in the late 1830s.23 Margaret Kiddle found records that at
least 20 per cent of the total white population in the early 1840s was
convict or ex-convict, but argued that it was probably closer to 40 per
cent.24 With the increasing rate of free migration and the cessation of
transportation to the eastern colonies during the 1840s, at Separation
in 1851 this class made up probably 15 per cent of the adult male
population overall, and probably 30 per cent in rural areas.25 Convictclass workers were central to the pastoral economy but free settlers
attempted to eface their presence in order to avoid the ‘convict stain’
that had already begun to be dreaded in the other eastern colonies.26
Charles Franks’ business partner, George Armytage, remained in
Van Diemen’s Land while Franks, his shepherd, his overseer George
Smith, and about 500 sheep walked some 35 kilometres from Gellibrand’s
Point on the coast to Mount Cottrell, arriving at the intended sheep run
on 2 July. According to the account he later gave, overseer George Smith
returned to the Point to collect supplies that had been let there. When
he returned to the run on 8 July 1836, he was alarmed to ind that there
was no campire. A lour cask had been overturned, and the two men
were nowhere to be seen. Fearing for his safety, Smith let hurriedly and
informed a number of settlers in the region of what he had seen. hese
men discovered the bodies the next day.27
At the time of the killings, and in their later memoirs, free settlers
in Port Phillip and Van Diemen’s Land remembered Charles Franks as a
gentleman. He was from northern Van Diemen’s Land, and Launceston’s
Cornwall Chronicle remembered his ‘strict integrity, gentlemanly
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deportment’ and his ‘docile and compassionate disposition’.28 One settler
even suggested that Franks had been in the process of distributing lour,
rice, and other goods to the Aboriginal locals when they treacherously
tomahawked him.29 But another respectable settler, Robert von Stieglitz,
remembered how Franks had shared lead with him for the production
of what Franks called ‘blue pills for the natives’.30 Since the 1960s, the
story of Charles Franks has usually been told with reference to these
blue pills.31 One historian inferred that Franks intended to poison the
local Aboriginal people.32 But it seems much more likely that, when von
Stieglitz said ‘pills’, he meant musket balls, or perhaps shot of a smaller
calibre. his means that, in the stores he took to Port Phillip, Franks
had the material he would need to shoot Aboriginal people. Perhaps
he had already shot some. hese blue pills have given a darker edge to
the igure of Franks in recent histories. His death thereby appears in
modern histories as an act of revenge, that is, that he was killed because
he had shot Aboriginal people. Indeed, that same idea had concerned
settlers at the time, and they took pains to reject it. In order to show that
Franks was blameless, they defended his character in the newspapers
and in letters to the colonial authorities.
George MacKillop, for example, who had recommended Franks
take up land at Mount Cottrell, told the colonial secretary in Sydney that
‘Mr. F. was extremely mild and conciliating in his manners, and could
not possibly have given provocation in any way’.33 Franks’ character
was also defended in the editorial of the Cornwall Chronicle. Knowing
that it would be rumoured that ‘some insult must have been conveyed
to the natives’ by Franks, that newspaper jumped to the defence of the
murdered entrepreneur, writing ‘of all men, perhaps, that unfortunate
gentleman was least likely to provoke his fellow creatures to acts of
violence’.34 Sources told the Cornwall Chronicle that a group of armed
settlers had tracked the suspected murderers and, ‘putting into efect a
preconcerted plan of attack, succeeded in “ANNIHILATING THEM”’.35
he newspaper went on to opine that ‘the “ANNIHILATION” of the
entire body of the Port Phillip natives, in our opinion, would aford
an insuicient revenge for the murder of such a man’.36 Worried by
the violence and the allegations that extra-judicial revenge had been
taken, New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke sent Captain
William Lonsdale to Port Phillip to become police magistrate in the
new settlement. Lonsdale was therefore the irst permanent government
Thomas Rogers – The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts
121
presence there. One of his irst priorities was to ascertain what had
happened after the killing of Franks and the shepherd. 37 When
questioned by Lonsdale, the members of the retaliatory party admitted
to iring guns at the suspected guilty clan but they insisted that no one
was killed.38 Based on this evidence, Lonsdale could not ind any of
the party guilty, nor prove that any Aboriginal people had been killed.
he bloodthirsty response of the Cornwall Chronicle was debated
by other colonial newspapers, not all of which thought vigilante justice
was a good thing. he crowing about the annihilation was reprinted
approvingly in the Australian and the Perth Gazette and Western
Australian Journal, but the Sydney Gazette was appalled.39 Relecting
on William Buckley, who had lived with the Wathaurong people of
the Western District for over 30 years, the Gazette asked, ‘Would not
any man rather live among savages than with civilized whites who
would perpetrate wholesale murder?’40 Similarly, the Sydney Monitor
reminded its readers that Aboriginal people were ighting of ‘foreign
intruders’.41 hese responses show the trend for the city papers towards
humanitarian editorials, compared to the favouring of the pastoralists
in the newspapers closer to the frontier, a diference of opinion that
has also been noted in later contexts.42 Although the newspapers held
opposing views on frontier conlict, they all wrote about the two white
victims with the same attention to their standing in society.
his makes the contrast between the fate of Franks and that of his
shepherd so much starker. While Franks’ death moved the Cornwall
Chronicle to call for genocidal revenge, the shepherd’s death was barely
remembered. He was not named in any newspaper report. In fact,
the shepherd’s name is recorded only twice. During Police Magistrate
Lonsdale’s investigation two men named him Flinders.43 Only in
this oicial documentation was he ever named. Reading newspaper
accounts of the death, it is easy to forget that Franks was not the only
man to die that day. Yet the shepherd’s fate was no less brutal than his
master’s; it was said that his head had been shattered so badly that his
brains had to be buried where he was found.44 While it is possible that
those reporting the deaths simply did not know the shepherd’s name,
the systematic way in which he was let out of the records points to a
deeper reason. At the same time that they remembered Charles Franks
as a gentleman, free settlers carefully established the attributes and
limits of the shepherd’s character.
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Flinders was named by only two men during the investigation, and
never by the man who claimed him as an employee, Franks’ business
partner George Armytage.45 his is part of the way that the free settlers
established the man’s character. He was given no irst name, and indeed
it must be remembered that convicts and emancipists oten went by
an alias or a nickname.46 Was ‘Flinders’ an alias or a nickname? His
fate illustrates the anonymity of men of his class in the records let by
respectable settlers. he disregard shown the shepherd is heightened by
the histrionic reaction to Franks’ murder—no one ever called for the
annihilation of a district’s Aboriginal peoples based on the character
of a convict victim.47
Settlers thought so little of the shepherd’s character that they
blamed him for the attacks. Edward Wedge, nephew of the government
surveyor, John Helder Wedge, made two points when he gave evidence
to Lonsdale. First, he declared that the weapons were British made.
‘From the nature of the cuts on the head’, he could tell that the
tomahawks used had been given by himself or his uncle upon their
arrival in the District to Aboriginal people ‘as presents to conciliate
them’.48 Aboriginal warriors wielding British-made weapons showed
the dangers of attempting to conciliate the natives. Settlers took this
seriously. When Police Magistrate Foster Fyans of the Portland Bay
District arrived at his new post, he was ordered to distribute goods
to the local Aboriginal people. Among the goods were two dozen
tomahawks—these he dumped into the Moorabool River.49 But Edward
Wedge’s second point was also telling. Straight ater giving evidence
that the tomahawks were British made, he began to talk about convict
behaviour and character: ‘It was the invariable practice in hiring servants
to make it part of the agreement that they were not in any way to molest
the natives, upon pain of forfeiting their wages’.50 Here, then, was where
the blame lay—not with the Aboriginal warriors, not with Wedge or his
uncle’s git giving, but with the character of the shepherd. Wedge all but
blamed the shepherd for provoking the attacks.
Edward Wedge’s comments did not come out of nowhere. In
blaming the convict-class shepherd for his own death, Wedge drew
on an established Vandiemonian idea that held most frontier violence
was instigated by men of this class. Examples of this idea abound,
particularly in the early 1830s. When presenting the treaty he had made
with the Kulin headmen to Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur of Van
Thomas Rogers – The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts
123
Diemen’s Land, John Batman claimed to be settling Port Phillip with the
intention of avoiding the disastrous conlict with Indigenous peoples
that had occurred in that colony.51 Governor Arthur also seems to have
felt strongly the need to avoid what had happened during the so-called
‘Black Wars’ of the late 1820s and early 1830s, during his time in oice.
In letters to oicials in London, he perpetuated the idea that the convicts
had been the chief cause of violence in Van Diemen’s Land. In early
1835, he wrote to the secretary of state for the colonies in London to
inform him that the Aboriginal Tasmanians had been reduced ‘almost
to annihilation … by the warfare so long waged, in detail, between
them and the white settlers, or rather, I should say, the bushrangers, and
convict shepherds’.52 He believed that convicts would instigate a similar
war in Port Phillip if their entry was not closely regulated and their
relations with other members of the new society, especially Aboriginal
people, were not closely watched.53 It was this notion that Edward Wedge
drew on to deine the character of the shepherd.
It was not only the men’s characters that came under scrutiny.
he written treatment of the corpses themselves reveals aspects of the
diference between master and man. George Sams, one of the party
of men who found the bodies, describes the shepherd’s body in some
detail: ‘we found the body of Flinders the shepherd, a short distance
from the tents, whose head was dreadfully lacerated and one side of
the head was driven into the ground evidently by blows from some
heavy weapon’.54 Compare this to his description of Franks’ body: ‘We
aterwards found the body of Mr Franks near the fence of his sheep
yard, about 40 yards from the body of Flinders; we saw one cut on
the side of the head. I did not wait to see the body more particularly
examined’.55 Now, Sams might have been a friend of Franks. And it is
possible, likely even, that one tomahawk victim was one too many for
Mr Sams to view. But closer inspection of the evidence collected by
Lonsdale reveals that Sams’ evidence its into a larger pattern. First, the
diference in status between the two victims was so obvious as almost to
require no comment: ‘Mr Franks’ and ‘Flinders’, rather than Mr Flinders,
and Flinders is never given a irst name. But the more telling point is
that the other members of the search party who gave sworn evidence
before Lonsdale all described the shepherd’s corpse in greater, gorier
detail than that of Franks. Doctor Barry Cotter saw ‘a very long deep
wound in the skull’ of the shepherd; ‘some of the brain was protruding’.
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When he described Franks’ body, Cotter noted two cuts on the head
and a blow to the temple, and then his evidence related in detail what
remained of Franks’ property and what had been stolen.56
Consider the treatment of the two victims by the Cornwall
Chronicle’s correspondent:
Mr. Franks received one blow on the right temple with the back part
of a tomahawk, the side and back part of the scull presented two large
cuts, which must have caused instant death; the head of his shepherd
was so dreadfully shattered, that his brains had to be buried on the
spot.57
he method of description of Franks’ head is medical, almost
clinical, while the description of the shepherd’s is lurid and morbidly
fascinating. Even if the facts were exaggerated by this correspondent,
it is noteworthy that the exaggeration was restricted to the discussion
of the unnamed shepherd. If contemporary events in England are
considered, this sensationalising of the shepherd’s corpse, and not that
of his master, its into a broader discourse. he 1830s were a time when
the corpses of the poor were in high demand in England for anatomy
schools. Criminals at this time could be sentenced to be dissected by
surgeons ater being executed.58 he newspaper’s gory description of
the shepherd its into this prevailing attitude. Consistent with their
acceptance of the broader notion of the violent or immoral convict,
the newspapers’ fascination with the corpse of the shepherd was an
acceptable sensationalism in 1836.
he bodies were buried at Burial Hill (now Flagstaf Gardens) and,
according to the later nineteenth-century chronicler of Melbourne,
Garryowen, ‘all the inhabitants [of the settlement] joined in the
melancholy ceremonial’.59 Both bodies being buried at a public funeral
may give the impression that the two men were being mourned in the
same manner, but this is not the case. Convict-class men had been killed
by Aboriginal people in Port Phillip before, but their bodies were not
brought to the settlement for burial, public or not.60 he diference in
the Franks’ case, as will be further illuminated below, was that a free
settler had been killed.
It could be argued that the description of the shepherd’s body
simply relected the reality that his body was more damaged than
that of Franks. Burying his brain at the site of the killing, rather than
Thomas Rogers – The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts
125
bringing him in whole to be buried in the settlement as Franks was,
could therefore have been a purely practical consideration. Two other
killings of Britons on the New South Wales frontier, however, show that
this was not the case. he irst instance comes from the new settlement
in the Moreton Bay District, present-day Queensland, and concerns
no less a personage than the assistant surveyor-general of New South
Wales, Granville Stapylton. Ater his surveying journeys with Major
homas Mitchell across the length and breadth of eastern Australia,
Stapylton was sent in 1840 to survey a track from the Moreton Bay
settlement to Sydney. It was while working on this track that Stapylton
and an assigned servant—a convict by the name of William Tuck—were
killed by Aboriginal people near the present Queensland–New South
Wales border.61
As in the Franks’ case, a gentleman of considerable standing in
society and a convict had both been brutally killed. Stapylton’s body
was found missing the arms, the right foot, and most of the lesh.62
he skull had been removed from the body, and was lying a little way
away.63 William Tuck’s body, on the other hand, was whole. Both bodies
had been burned. So, in this case, the gentleman’s body was in a much
worse condition, but the convict’s body was buried on the spot and
Stapylton’s was carried the 120 kilometres back to Brisbane, where he
was buried.64 he burial of William Tuck on the undiferentiated frontier
while Stapylton’s body was returned to the settlement is reminiscent
of the burial of the shepherd’s brain four years earlier in Port Phillip.
hese burials show that the treatment of a victim of frontier violence
depended on the victim’s station in settler society.
he second case comes from Port Phillip, less than a year ater the
deaths of Franks and the shepherd. It too shows the distinction between
master and man. In March 1837, Joseph Gellibrand and George Hesse
went missing somewhere west of the new settlement of Melbourne. Both
men were respectable lawyers from Van Diemen’s Land, and Gellibrand
was probably the author of John Batman’s famous treaty.65 he two men
had been travelling with a convict-class stockman who turned back
ater the lawyers refused to believe his advice that they were lost. he
stockman organised a search party, but the lost lawyers were never heard
from again.66 Following the pattern, ater their deaths the men were
remembered as respectable gentlemen presumed killed by ‘savages’.67
Actually, Gellibrand and Hesse had more likely died of exposure.68
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Remembering the dead gentlemen in this case required free settlers to
forget the lower-class man who had survived. Free settler memorialists
of Gellibrand and Hesse had to forget the fact that, had the gentlemen
followed their servant’s advice, it probably would have saved their lives.
In both of these cases, colonial newspapers emphasised the gentle
and civilised character of the free settlers in order to diferentiate them
from both the classes lower than them and the local Indigenous people.
Letters to oicials and newspaper accounts made public a very real grief
for lost friends, but they also elevated those friends to almost heroic
status. Franks, alongside the murdered assistant surveyor-general and
the lost lawyers in the bush, was extolled because he was at the forefront
of a rapidly expanding land empire. To the free settlers coming across
Bass Strait, he was one of their own, even to those he had not met. hese
men took the plains of New South Wales for personal and national
proit. he way Franks was remembered showed that, in settler eyes,
this land rush was not simply for gain but part of a project to civilise
a wilderness. In the way it was presented to the public and to colonial
oicials, Franks’ death became a sacriice to this greater goal.
he shocking goriness of the tale makes it morbidly interesting, and
the fact that Franks was so well remembered at the time means that the
story is still repeated today, though generally only in a few sentences.69
Rather than focusing on the violence of the retaliatory raid, as others
have done, in this article I have focused on the incident itself. he killing
of Franks and the shepherd illustrates on a small scale the ways that free
settlers understood the diference between convicts and themselves. he
contrast between the remembrance of ‘Flinders’—perhaps not even his
real name—and Franks is astounding. he records of the respectable
settlers examined above show that Charles Franks was mourned, and
that some called for revenge. On the other hand, the shepherd was not
clearly identiied, was blamed for the attacks that killed him and his
master, and, inally, was used as an object of lurid sensationalism once
he was killed.
Free settler responses to the killings drew upon three broader
tropes developed in the 1830s. he irst, exempliied by the testimony
of Edward Wedge, perpetuated the Vandiemonian idea of the violent
or immoral convict, a man who either through violence against
Aboriginal men, or ‘interference’ (as it was euphemistically known)
with Aboriginal women, brought about his own destruction at the hands
Thomas Rogers – The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts
127
of vengeful warriors. Second, the gory remembrance of the shepherd’s
body—ignominiously buried in two places—was consistent with the
contemporary English practice of sensationalising and dissecting the
bodies of the lower orders. he third trope was the Imperial genre of
remembrances of gentlemen who met with violent ends on the outer
fringes of the Empire. hese remembrances were more than obituaries;
beyond simply remembering the dead, they extolled the deceased’s
actions in the service of the Empire and, by emphasising the savagery
of the locals, justiied the continued expansion of the civilising and
proit-making project.
In the history of Australia, or indeed the British Empire, the killing
of Franks and the shepherd is almost an insigniicant event. Historians
have rightly treated it as the irst clash in a land war for resources. his
close examination of the deaths, however, has revealed that the incident
can also be used to illuminate free settler attitudes towards class or
station in the community of Britons that had formed the Port Phillip
beachhead. hree powerful ideas overlapped at the base of Mount
Cottrell: a Vandiemonian conceit, a class-based English curiosity, and
the demonstration of Imperial righteousness. he method adopted here
of looking at the incident and immediate response in detail has provided
a new depth of knowledge about the event. his in turn has shown how
the free settler impulse to eface convicts from Victoria’s history began
from the very irst days of white settlement at Port Phillip. It leads to a
greater understanding of the free settlement of the Port Phillip District,
and a greater understanding of how the British Empire operated through
the minds of the free settlers in the District, and by implication, along
the frontiers of Australia.
Notes
1
2
128
his article stems from a short case study in my PhD thesis, and so I would like to
thank my thesis supervisors, Professor Andrew May and Professor Stuart Macintyre,
for their helpful comments and suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank Dr
Alexandra Dellios and Associate Professor David Roberts, who read the manuscript
and gave helpful input, as did the anonymous peer reviewers.
Mount Cottrell is named ater Port Phillip Association member Anthony Cottrell,
and is near the Werribee River in Victoria. his article uses the modern location’s
spelling of ‘Cottrell’; at the time, the name was variously spelt ‘Cotterell’, ‘Cotteril’,
‘Cotwall’, and ‘Cottrell’.
Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Robert von Stieglitz, ‘Reminiscences, written at Drummondoney’, 1875–76, typescript,
p. 9, H 15945, MS Box 391/4, State Library of Victoria (SLV).
George Armytage, 6 October 1853, in homas Bride, Letters From Victorian Pioneers,
ed. C.E. Sayers, Melbourne, William Heinemann, 1969, pp. 172–3. Lyndall Ryan
describes the shepherd as an Aboriginal Tasmanian, but I have not found any
evidence for this. Free settlers classed him as a convict-class white man. George
MacKillop, reporting the deaths to the colonial secretary of Van Diemen’s Land,
listed the shepherd as one of four Europeans killed recently in Port Phillip. Lyndall
Ryan, ‘Settler Massacres on the Port Phillip Frontier, 1836–1851’, Journal of Australian
Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, p. 267; George MacKillop to Col. Sec. Alexander McLeay,
28 July 1836, folder 14, VPRS 4, Public Record Oice Victoria (PROV).
Class and station have been considered by Victorian historians: see Paul de Serville,
Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne before the Gold Rushes,
Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1980; and Martin Sullivan, Men & Women of
Port Phillip, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, 1985.
See, for example, Paul Carter, he Road to Botany Bay, London, Faber and Faber,
1987, pp. 331–2; and Tifany Shellam, ‘“Our Natives” and “Wild Blacks”: Enumeration
as a Statistical Dimension of Sovereignty in Colonial Western Australia’, Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 13, no. 3, 2012, pp. 1–19.
On Australian frontier conflict, see Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, Sydney,
NewSouth, 2013; and Bain Attwood and S.G. Foster (eds), Frontier Conlict: he
Australian Experience, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 2003.
See Bill Gammage, he Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia,
Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2011.
John Batman, Journal, 30 May 1835, MS13181 (p. 35 of transcript), SLV, at http://
handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/249297.
Gammage, pp. 103–04.
See, for example, C.D. Rowley, he Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Canberra,
Pelican, 1970; Henry Reynolds, he Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance
to the European Invasion of Australia, Melbourne, Penguin, 1982; John Connor, he
Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2002. See also Stuart
Macintyre and Anna Clark, he History Wars, Melbourne, Melbourne University
Press, 2003, pp. 43–4.
See Keith Windschuttle, he Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Sydney, Macleay Press,
2002; Michael Connor, he Invention of Terra Nullius, Sydney, Macleay Press, 2005.
See, in particular, Michael Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–1886,
Sydney, Sydney University Press, 1979, p. 78; Jan Critchett, A ‘Distant Field of Murder’,
Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1990, pp. 90–1; and Judith Bassett, ‘he
Faithfull Massacre at the Broken River, 1838’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 13,
no. 24, 1989, pp. 18–34.
Good examples of reconsiderations of admissible historical evidence and Aboriginal
death tolls can be found in David Kent, ‘Frontier Conlict and Aboriginal Deaths: How
Do We Weigh the Evidence?’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, vol. 8, 2006, pp.
23–42; and Ian D. Clark, ‘he Convincing Ground Aboriginal Massacre at Portland
Bay, Victoria: Fact or Fiction?’, Aboriginal History, vol. 35, 2011, pp. 79–109.
Thomas Rogers – The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts
129
15 See, for example, A.G.L. Shaw, A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria before
Separation, Melbourne, Miegunyah Press, 1996, pp. 57, 113–14, 134; and C.M.H.
Clark, A History of Australia, Vol. 3, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1973,
p. 93; Rex Harcourt, Southern Invasion, Northern Conquest, Melbourne, Golden
Point Press, 2001, pp. 90–1; Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground, Canberra, Aboriginal
Studies Press, 2007, pp. 5–10. On the ferocity of the retaliation and the pact of silence
among the settlers, see James Boyce, 1835, Melbourne, Black Inc., 2011, pp. 106–09.
16 Ryan, ‘Settler Massacres’, p. 267. For a discussion of the ighting in the Western District
(though it does not mention the Franks case), see Michael Cannon, Who Killed the
Koories?, Melbourne, William Heinemann, 1990, pp. 85–109, 115–23.
17 According to oicial sources, the retaliatory party comprised eight whites, ‘four Sydney
natives and ive domesticated natives of Port Phillip, all armed … with muskets’. See
VDL Col. Sec. John Montagu to NSW Col. Sec. Alexander Macleay, 18 August 1836,
Historical Records of Victoria (HRV), Vol. 2a, Melbourne, 1982, p. 42. he so-called
‘Sydney natives’ had accompanied John Batman from Parramatta to Van Diemen’s
Land to Port Phillip, and had participated in his roving parties there during the
‘Black War’. hey were not all from Sydney; Pigeon was also known as Warrora and
was from Shoalhaven, while Crook was also known as Johninbia or Yunbai and was
originally from Five Islands, Wollongong. See Alastair Campbell, John Batman and
the Aborigines, Malmsbury (Vic.), Kibble Books, n.d., c. 1987, p. 30.
18 Campbell, pp. 170–2.
19 Robert Kenny, ‘Tricks or Treats? A Case for Kulin Knowing in Batman’s Treaty’,
History Australia vol. 5, no. 2, 2008, pp. 38.1–38.14.
20 Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2012, p. 74.
21 For a detailed account of the treaty process, see Bain Attwood, Possession, Melbourne,
Miegunyah Press, 2009, pp. 40–71. For the land rush into Port Phillip, see Boyce, p.
xi.
22 Remarking on the departure of the schooner Champion for Port Phillip from
Launceston, on which Charles Franks was a passenger, the Sydney Gazette wrote
‘With the Vandiemonians Port Phillip continues all the rage’. he ship had let on 16
May 1836: see Sydney Gazette, 2 June 1836.
23 Shaw, p. 85.
24 Margaret Kiddle, Men of Yesterday: A Social History of the Western District of Victoria,
1834–1890, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1967, p. 52.
25 Richard Broome, he Victorians: Arriving, Sydney, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1984,
p. 58. On this topic, see also Sullivan, p. 135.
26 See John Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales,
Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1983.
27 Evidence of George Smith to William Lonsdale, 21 October 1836, HRV, Vol. 2a, p.
43.
28 Cornwall Chronicle, 30 July 1836.
29 John Aitken, 26 August 1853, in Bride, p. 50.
30 Stieglitz, p. 8.
130
Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016
31 See Peter Corris, Aborigines and Europeans in Western Victoria, Canberra, Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1968, p. 54; C.E. Sayers (ed.), in Bride, p. 88, footnote 2;
Critchett, p. 91; Pascoe, pp. 7–8. Shaw, p. 134, does not mention ‘blue pills’ speciically,
but he does wonder whether or not there was provocation by Franks or his shepherd.
32 Critchett, p. 91.
33 George MacKillop to Col. Sec. Alexander McLeay, 28 July 1836, folder 14, VPRS 4,
PROV.
34 Cornwall Chronicle, 30 July 1836.
35 Cornwall Chronicle, 30 July 1836.
36 Cornwall Chronicle, 30 July 1836.
37 Col. Sec. Alexander McLeay to William Lonsdale, 13 September 1836, folder 15,
VPRS 4, PROV.
38 See the evidence of William Winberry, Michael Leonard, and Edward Wedge, who all
agree that shots were ired but that no Aboriginal people were harmed or killed. John
Wood gave the curious evidence ‘I am positive I did not know of any blacks losing
their lives on this occasion’ (p. 48). Only Henry Batman admitted any uncertainty,
conceding that leeing people might have been hit by shots, although he was sure
that the shots he had ired had had no efect. See Lonsdale’s investigation into the
deaths of Franks and Flinders, Melbourne Court Register, 28 October 1836 HRV,
Vol. 2a, pp. 48–50.
39 Australian, 26 August 1836; Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, 26
November 1836; Sydney Gazette, 30 August 1836.
40 Sydney Gazette, 30 August 1836. Original emphasis.
41 Sydney Monitor, 31 August 1836.
42 For a good example of these two sides, see the debate between the Hobart newspapers
Colonial Times, 9 August 1836, and the True Colonist, 5 August 1836. On later clashes,
see, for example, Rebecca Wood, ‘Frontier Violence and the Bush Legend: he Sydney
Herald’s Response to the Myall Creek Massacre Trials and the Creation of Colonial
Identity’, History Australia, vol. 6, no. 3, 2009, p. 67.5; and Jack Cross, Great Central
State: he Foundation of the Northern Territory, Adelaide, Wakeield Press, 2011, p.
230.
43 Lonsdale’s investigation into the deaths of Charles Franks and his shepherd Flinders,
Melbourne Court Register, 21–28 October 1836, HRV, Vol. 2a, pp. 43–50.
44 Sydney Monitor, 31 August 1836.
45 Evidence of George Smith and George Sams, Lonsdale’s investigation into the deaths
of Charles Franks and his shepherd Flinders, Melbourne Court Register, 21–28
October 1836, HRV, Vol. 2a, pp. 43–50. According to some records, Flinders was
also known as ‘Hindes’: see index to HRV, Vol. 2b, p. 785.
46 Russel Ward, he Australian Legend, London, Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1965,
p. 73. George Hamilton remembered that his personal attendant was variously called:
‘Crooked Jack’, ‘Humpy’, or ‘My Lord’. See George Hamilton, Experiences of a Colonist
Forty Years Ago, Adelaide, J. Williams, 2nd edn, 1880, p. 5.
47 Some squatters did call for the eradication of Aboriginal people because of convict
killings, but this was an entirely economic proposition, in the same vein as calling
for the eradication of Aboriginal people to stop the losses of sheep and cattle. What
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is seen in the Chronicle piece is a call for the eradication of Aboriginal people based
on the character of the gentleman they had murdered. See also Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler
Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8,
no. 4, December 2006, pp. 387–409; and Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Diference:
Elementary Structures of Race’, American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 3, June 2001,
pp. 869–71.
Edward Wedge’s evidence to Lonsdale’s investigation into the deaths of Charles Franks
and his shepherd Flinders, Melbourne Court Register, 28 October 1836, HRV, Vol.
2a, p. 49.
Foster Fyans, undated, in Bride, p. 180.
Edward Wedge’s evidence to Lonsdale’s investigation into the deaths of Charles Franks
and his shepherd Flinders, Melbourne Court Register, 28 October 1836, HRV, Vol.
2a, p. 49.
John Batman to Governor Arthur, 25 June 1835, HRV, Vol. 1, p. 5. Arthur agreed that
war such as had occurred in Van Diemen’s Land had to be avoided in Port Phillip.
See George Arthur to Glenelg, 27 January 1835, quoted in Clive Turnbull, Black War,
Melbourne, F.W. Cheshire, 1948, pp. 168–70.
Governor Arthur to T.S. Rice, Secretary of State for Colonies, 27 January 1835, HRV,
Vol. 2a, p. 6. He had made similar claims earlier, as had other Vandiemonian oicials.
See, for example, Arthur to Murray, 15 April 1830, Historical Records of Australia
(HRA), Series 3, Vol. 9, p. 106. See also the Report of the Aborigines Committee,
enclosed in that letter, on pp. 206 and 216–17 of that volume, in which convicts
committing violent acts against Aboriginal people are labelled ‘these barbarians’.
Governor Arthur to T.S. Rice, Secretary of State for Colonies, 27 January 1835, HRV,
Vol. 2a, pp. 6–7.
George Sams’ evidence to Lonsdale’s investigation into the deaths of Charles Franks
and his shepherd Flinders, Melbourne Court Register, 21 October 1836, HRV, Vol.
2a, p. 44.
Sams’ evidence, p. 44.
Barry Cotter’s evidence to Lonsdale’s investigation into the deaths of Franks and
Flinders, Melbourne Court Register, 28 October 1836, HRV, Vol. 2a, p. 46.
Cornwall Chronicle, 30 July 1836.
Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 2nd edn, 2000, pp. 35–7. See also Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds),
Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Durham, Duke
University Press, 2005.
Garryowen [Edmund Finn], he Chronicles of Early Melbourne, 1835 to 1852,
Melbourne, Fergusson and Mitchell, 1888, p. 7.
George McKillop to Alexander McLeay, Col. Sec. V.D.L., 28 July 1836, folder 14,
VPRS 4, PROV.
Louis Cranield, ‘Stapylton, Granville William Chetwynd (1800–1840)’, Australian
Dictionary of Biography, at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stapylton-granvillewilliam-chetwynd-2693/text3769.
Sydney Gazette, 29 August 1840; Sydney Herald, 2 September 1840.
Sydney Herald, 2 September 1840.
Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016
64 Sydney Gazette, 29 August 1840; Sydney Herald, 2 September 1840. See also Cranield.
65 Attwood, p. 17.
66 Michael Cannon (ed.), ‘he Disappearance of Gellibrand and Hesse’, HRA, Vol. 2a,
p. 271. See also G.T. Lloyd, hirty-hree Years in Tasmania and Victoria, London,
Houlston and Wright, 1862, pp. 485–9.
67 See, for example, Colonial Times, 16 May 1837; and True Colonist, 19 May 1837.
68 Gellibrand had nearly perished in the bush the year before, walking from Westernport
to the settlement (present-day Melbourne). Refer to his own account in J.T.
Gellibrand, Memorandum of a trip to Port Phillip, 24–30 January 1836, in Bride,
pp. 7–13. Ater the lawyers disappeared in 1837, squatter Alexander homson said,
somewhat insensitively, ‘Gellibrand is the worst bushman I know’. Colonial Times,
11 April 1837.
69 See, for example, the history section of Brimbank City Council’s website, http://www.
brimbank.vic.gov.au/People_and_Places/About_Brimbank/Historical_Brimbank,
(10 September 2012).
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