VICTORIAN HISTORICAL JOURNAL ISSUE 285 VOLUME 87, NUMBER 1 JUNE 2016 Royal Historical Society of Victoria Victorian Historical Journal Published by the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 239 A’Beckett Street Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia Telephone: 03 9326 9288 Fax: 03 9326 9477 Email: oice@historyvictoria.org.au www.historyvictoria.org.au Copyright © the authors and the Royal Historical Society of Victoria 2016 All material appearing in this publication is copyright and cannot be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher and the relevant author. Design: Janet Boschen, Boschen Design Desktop Production: John Gillespie, Kiplings Business Communications Printer: BPA Print Group Print Post Approved: PP349181/00159 ISSN 1030 7710 The Royal Historical Society of Victoria acknowledges the support of the Victorian Government though Creative Victoria—Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources. Front cover: South Melbourne showing the Robur Tea Building, c. 1927. Courtesy State Library of Victoria. 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. 118 Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016 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 120 Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016 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. 122 Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016 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’. 124 Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016 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.68 126 Victorian Historical Journal, Volume 87, Number 1, June 2016 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 Thomas Rogers – The Killing of Charles Franks and the Obliteration of Port Phillip’s Convicts 131 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 132 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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