5

The Intimate, Urbanising Frontier:

Native Camps and Settler
Colonialism’s Violent Array of
Spaces around Early Melbourne
Penelope Edmonds

During the 1840s many Aboriginal people moved in and out of the new
settlement of Melbourne, and lived and camped along the Yarra River
and Merri Creek, which run through the northeastern stretches of the
city. Yet, in 1841 newly arrived Englishwoman Sarah Bunbury could walk
the same river and see an entirely different settler space. ‘I am charmed
with Australia dear Mama and Papa’, she wrote in a letter home. Sarah
described the houses of Europeans along the banks of the Yarra River in
this early settlement as ‘very pretty English cottages’, and ‘at the back of
the house was a pretty plantation of gum trees and mimosas . . . thinned
out enough to make it look like an English park’.1 Although Sarah’s hus-
band, Hanmer Bunbury, freely registered his own hostile adjudications
of Aboriginal people in letters home, in her many letters Sarah never
mentioned sighting or encountering a single Aboriginal person, until at
last Hanmer took her to view an Aboriginal corroboree in 1843.
The town of Melbourne, in the Port Phillip Bay area of southeastern
Australia, was officially founded by Governor Richard Bourke in 1837.
This colonial outpost, first settled in 1835 by entrepreneurial overstrait-
ers from Van Diemen’s Land seeking new pastoral lands, sat uneasily at
the edge of Britain’s empire and largesse. It was also sited on Aboriginal
land, in the midst of the confederacy of cultural-linguistic groups in the
Port Phillip Bay region now referred to as the Kulin Nation, comprising
the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Wathawurrung, Djadjawurrung and the
Daungwurrung. These groups had lived around the greater Port Phillip
Bay area for around 40,000 years, constantly adapting to its changes.2 In
1839 the ‘miam.miam or huts’ of the Aborigines, wrote Chief Aboriginal
Protector Augustus Robinson, were ‘scattered over a beautiful emi-
nence at the north east corner of the township’.3 In this year Robinson
reported that the Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) and Boonwurrung clans
129
T. B. Mar et al. (eds.), Making Settler Colonial Space
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2010
130 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

around Melbourne comprised around 230 people.4 Many hundreds

from other groups also came in and out of the town every year for cer-
emonial reasons.
For a period of at least fifteen years Aboriginal peoples were present
in the streets of early Melbourne. Pushed off their traditional lands by
settlers, and frequently starving, Aboriginal peoples began to replace
traditional subsistence practices by bartering goods and engaging in
itinerant labour in the town. By the early 1840s, with increasing num-
bers of European immigrants moving into Melbourne, efforts were
gradually made to push Aboriginal people out of developing town
space, with the index of the Town Council minutes noting on several
occasions the ‘evils’ and ‘Inconvenience and Immorality of the Blacks
being in the town’.5
There has been a striking absence of historical work on Indigenous
presence in developing settler colonial cities. Many studies, especially in
Australia, have ignored the dynamic, interactive contact histories of the
colonial cityscape, as if Indigeneity stopped at the urban. Much inter-
national literature on colonial cities has regularly privileged franchise
colonial over settler colonial formations, and metropolitan concerns are
usually foregrounded, largely omitting the lived realities and gendered
and racialised contours of settler cities. Little attention has been paid to
the dynamic histories of intimate and mixed relations for Indigenous
peoples and newcomers in such urbanising colonial spaces.6
Settler colonial cities are places of the most thoroughgoing extinguish-
ment of native title today.7 It is no coincidence that in much traditional
Australian historiography colonial cities and the racialised dimensions
of the nineteenth-century urbanising frontier have been rarely debated
and largely under-scrutinised. Indeed, this phenomenon tends to amne-
sia. Although a growing body of work has begun to address Australia’s
postcolonial cities and consider Aboriginality and the urban, Australia’s
nineteenth-century colonial cities and urban development have been
largely depicted and studied in traditional and triumphalist terms of
infrastructural and imperial progress.8 Further, studies by historians and
geographers of gender and Indigenous women in such cities are woe-
fully scant, thus constituting a doubly neglected area of scholarship.
Neglect of the settler colonial city in much scholarly endeavour has
also largely led to its excision from considerations and reformulation
of what constitutes the ‘frontier’, with all its racialised and gendered
contours. For too long historians of Australia have imagined the colo-
nial frontier as a problem only of the bush or borderlands, as places of
conflict where European pastoralists encroached on Aboriginal lands.
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 131

The frontier of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been
inaccurately conceptualised as a linear, expansionist phenomenon,
marking civilisation from savagery, a clear divide about which they can
record ‘official’ martial-style engagements between males as a reflection
of colonial relations. Astoundingly, Beverley Nance’s article (1981) on
European and Aboriginal violence in Port Phillip asserted that ‘personal
relations between white and black were almost non-existent’.9 Nance’s
study, like many others, focused on official incidents of violence and
combat, denying the crucial interpersonal dimensions of racialised rela-
tions, and especially the dynamics of gendered and sexualised power
inherent in and foundational to the colonial process.
Gratifyingly, in the last decade or so there has been an extensive
reconsideration and problematisation of the frontier as a more complex,
shifting and intimate phenomenon, largely the product of an encounter
between postcolonial and feminist scholarship. Jan Critchett, writing
on the Western Districts of Victoria, southeastern Australia in the 1830s
and 1840s, noted that rather than a linear frontier, it was ‘local, shift-
ing, and inescapable’. Contested land was the ‘very land each settler
lived on’, with the other side of the frontier being ‘just as easily the
bed shared with an Aboriginal women’.10 As a range of Australian and
international scholars of empire have now begun to explore, the settler
colonial frontier was not an outward-moving linear abstraction, but was
often domestic, local and personal.11 The ‘contact zone’ first articulated
by Mary Louise Pratt, in particular, helped to extend conceptions of the
frontier, making it transactional, and emphasising ‘co-presence’ and
‘interaction’, within of course radically uneven schemas of power.12
In line with such propositions, this chapter argues that early towns
and cities were developing urban frontiers, equally charged and
often-violent contact zones of racialised spatial contestations. Such
urbanising frontiers were mosaic-like, mercurial, transcultural and,
importantly, intimate and gendered.13 Sarah Bunbury’s lack of aware-
ness and recognition of Aboriginal presence in developing Melbourne,
and of the intense and at times brutal interactions between Aboriginal
and Europeans, perhaps a wilful not-seeing, is reflective of the differ-
ing experiences of European men and women in the new settler space.
Crucially, it also reveals the bifurcated space of the colonial encoun-
ter, and the markedly different lives of middle-class white women as
compared to Aboriginal women, who lived in the many encampments
around the town, and along more remote waterways, and for whom
often violent, sexualised contact with white men was an everyday
occurrence in the developing urban frontier.
132 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

This chapter is therefore centrally concerned with empire, gender and

the emergent settler colonial urban space of Melbourne, a place com-
monly depicted as thoroughly homosocial in culture, between the late
1830s and the 1850s. It examines the lives of Aboriginal women and
immigrants in the new settler cityscape and surrounds, and the simul-
taneous development of three new spaces or zones of settler colonial-
ism: town space, ‘native camps’ or fringe camps around the perimeter
of Melbourne, and the more distant pastoral frontier. Native camps
were hidden spaces, often left unmentioned in official archives, yet
these places were often sites of intense contact between white men and
Aboriginal women, intimate and frequently conflicted frontiers. New
considerations of the interpersonal, lived dimensions of the colonial
city, as an equally racially charged and violent frontier, are thus brought
together in this chapter along with recent thinking on the intimate,
gendered dimensions of empire. Lastly, the chapter reflects on settler
colonialism’s rapid reorganisation and creation of new bodies and
spaces across this array of frontier zones, and argues that such spaces
functioned together and had more in common with each other than is
at first apparent, namely a continuum of colonial violence operating
through various modalities that were gendered and raced.

Double vision along the Yarra River: colonial space,

gender and intimacy

Sarah Bunbury lived with her husband first on a farm in Newton or

‘new town’, outside the main settlement of Melbourne, and her married
life in their cottage was one of confinement.14 As her husband Hanmer
wrote, ‘My sally [sic] is very well indeed and the most industrious lit-
tle body in the world; while I am in Town every day worrying myself
to death trying to effect sales, she sits at home drawing; poor girl she
hardly ever gets a ride or sees anything of the pretty country about
us.’15 It has long been acknowledged that white women, along with
male settlers, were significant actors in the process of settlement in
Aboriginal territories and complicit in the dispossession of Aboriginal
lands. Yet, as residents of the ‘private sphere’, white women’s contact
with Aboriginal peoples was often limited or brokered by white men.16
Nevertheless, some white women were keen, if partial, observers, and
sometimes defied Victorian conventions. Others failed to perceive,
or seemed wilfully to omit details in their record of events that were
part of the new settlement. In the early 1840s the diarist and painter
Georgiana McCrae described Aboriginal people in Melbourne lining up
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 133

at the abattoirs for meat, wrote of crossing the Yarra River on the punt
with two Aboriginal men and a woman, and of her own children play-
ing with Aboriginal children who camped along the Yarra River.17 Her
writings on Aborigines, however, were scant and remained within the
bounds of gentility, usually omitting or obscuring any hint of conflict
or colonial violence. Georgiana McCrae did not write that her brother-
in-law, Dr Farquhar McCrae, had tied up and flogged an Aboriginal
man, Nunupton, in the street, whom he claimed had robbed him.18 She
did not mention the many Aboriginal people with syphilis, contracted
from European men, who were living in desperate state on the outskirts
of the town. Nor did she chronicle the nefarious activities of European
men in the native camps that existed around the town precinct at this
time. Aborigines seemingly did not exist for some Europeans, but others,
including missionaries, wrote much of Aboriginal presence and plight.
The words of Sarah Bunbury and Georgiana McCrae reveal this double
vision, the strange bifurcated space of the colonial encounter, where
Aborigines were at once absent and present to the colonial eye. They tell
us of the intimacy and distance of the colonial encounter, although that
intimacy was sometimes forced, and the distance at times wilful.
In a critical examination of theoretical work on gender and space,
Sara Mills has observed that the confinement of European women has
often been viewed as the ‘determining factor in women’s sense of their
position within spatial frameworks’.19 Yet, reflecting on the colonial
experience, the ‘complexity of gendered spatial relations’ cannot be
encompassed simply within the ‘notion of confinement’. As Mills rightly
notes, often the experience of white women, especially women travel-
lers, in the colonial sphere was characterised by new freedoms unavail-
able within spatial strictures at home. Yet, for colonised Indigenous
women in British colonies such as in Africa and India, their freedom
was limited ‘not by their own families within the harem of purdah, but
through fear of attack or rape by British soldiers’.20 Likewise, glimpses
in the archives, as well as more recent oral and written testimony
from Aboriginal women, tell us that in the settler colonies of Australia,
sexualised, racist violence was often the operative factor in many colo-
nised Aboriginal women’s daily spatial considerations.21 Despite this,
Aboriginal women in Australian colonial towns and cities of the early to
mid-nineteenth century have typically received little more than fleeting
mentions in much visual and literary material of the period, often much
less so than their male counterparts. When they are mentioned, it is fre-
quently in the language of highly sexualised binary stereotypes, as ‘ugly
wretches’, or desirable temptresses, terms that pivot on their perceived
134 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

attractiveness to European heterosexual men. In this chapter I argue that

the urbanising frontier was an intimate frontier, a place of shared domes-
tic and collaborative moments, as well as conflict, between Indigenous
and non-Indigenous peoples. The study of colonial urban space, sex, race
and fears of miscegenation provides an essential contour of settler colo-
nial urban relations, which should not be overlooked. In settler colonies
such intimate relations were not merely ‘reflective of but were constitu-
tive of colonialism’.22 Further, these intimate relations, as Ann Stoler has
maintained, are formative in the ‘making of racial categories and in the
management of imperial rule’.23 Such interactions were an implicit part
of the long colonial encounter, and as I will argue, were foundational to
the building of colonial cities on Indigenous land.

Urbanising space, gaps in the grid, and Aboriginal

surveillance and removal

In 1841 a property boom swept through Melbourne as Aboriginal lands

were ‘opened’ for pastoralism in the southeastern reaches of the Colony
of New South Wales. As the spread of this newly created private prop-
erty moved outwards into Aboriginal lands, it was in the unallotted
spaces, such as river banks, road reserves and swamps near the town
where Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples could remain safely. As
Denis Byrne writes evocatively, since the cadastral spread halted at the
shorelines, the rivers and swamps became unallotted zones or ‘gaps in
the grid’ allowing freer movement for Aboriginal people who had boats
or canoes.24 Swamp areas on the opposite side of the Yarra River from
the main town, referred to as the south bank, were therefore some of
the few remaining sanctuaries or gaps between an increasingly allotted
network of private property in the town and an uneven but burgeoning
cadastre of fenced paddocks in the surrounding pastoral lands.
Such spaces along the rivers and creeks were transitional within the
process of colonisation, nervous spaces that were not yet property. For
even as Aboriginal people lived along its banks, the Aboriginal lands of
the Merri Creek area were being auctioned off lot by lot with no mention
of their owner’s existence. In 1840 the Port Phillip Gazette announced
the public auction of 150 acres of land along the Merri Creek.25 To the
‘capitalist and speculator of land’ it exclaimed ‘very little need be said
of the profits of such a speculation . . . [as] the smiling faces and well
lined pockets amply testify’. The advertisement appealed to the ‘Settlers,
Tradesmen, Yeomanry’, and others of Port Phillip and assured that they
would be ‘laying the stepping stone of a fortune for their offspring’.26
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 135

The process of invasion and colonisation swiftly reordered bodies and

spaces. New spaces were forming, and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
lives were altered in this transactional contact zone.
In 1842 the inhabitants of the town of Melbourne became a corpo-
ration, administered by the Melbourne Town Council (to become the
Melbourne City Council in 1847).27 The Council sought to regulate and
order urbanising settler space, and attempted to fashion this unruly fron-
tier town as a grided new world city, a place of white civility. The surveil-
lance and regulation of Aboriginal peoples was central to such a desired
order. Although some Aboriginal men were indentured to short-term
labour contracts in this early period, increasingly the Council sought to
push Aboriginal peoples from town space. Residents often used outright
violence and dogs to deter Aboriginal people from entering the town. As
William Adeney wrote in 1843, shortly after his arrival from England,
‘These poor creatures wander through accosting passers by with “give
me black money” and various other similar expressions begging bread,
etc. . . . We are not much troubled by them as my host keeps a great
black dog which is quite furious.’28 Sarah Bunbury’s husband, Hanmer
Bunbury, was in no doubt about Aboriginal presence in town, remarking
‘Never trust a native and never allow them near your house.’29
In town, physical attacks on Aborigines by Europeans were common-
place. For example, a young Aborigine named ‘An.note’ complained to
the Chief Aboriginal Protector George Augustus Robinson that a ‘white
man had struck him and knocked him down with his fist near MacNall’s,
the butcher, because he asked for bread’.30 While Robinson was in the
street, two Aboriginal men came to him to complain that a ‘white per-
son’ had assaulted them by ‘striking him with a stick and kicking him’.
Karngrook and Bulbegunner, two Aboriginal women, were in Little
Collins Street, near the butchers, probably in the hope of receiving some
meat, when the butcher’s assistant ‘set a large dog on them’. Two white
witnesses ‘willingly offered to appear and give evidence against the brutal
conduct of the man’, wrote William Thomas, Aboriginal Protector of the
Melbourne area. Yet the Police Magistrate ‘refused to grant a Summons,
stating that he would have nothing to do with Aboriginal affairs’.
Thomas made out a legal summons and served it himself, as the Police
Magistrate would not. His calls for constabulary assistance to defend
Aboriginal people in the street were regularly ignored.31 Such reprisals for
begging, and the treatment meted out to the Aboriginal man, Nunupton,
who was bound up and flogged in the street by Dr Farquhar McCrae
reveal a particular form of disciplinary violence in the streetscape, which
Europeans believed it was their entitlement to administer.32
136 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

Shared spaces and amenities in town became sites of contestation.

Restrictions were placed on Aboriginal people swimming near the town,
the use of the river punt and town pumps, and their dogs. Often such
‘problems’ were left to the Aboriginal Protectors; however, the ‘evils’ of
Aborigines in the town were raised intermittently in the Town Council
minutes. In 1845 it was moved that the ‘Mayor be requested to address his
Honour the Superintendent and the Chief Protector of the Aborigines, on
the increasing inconvenience and demoralisation attendant on the pres-
ence of the Blacks within the Town’.33 Later in the same month a letter
was read to the Council ‘from His Honour the Superintendent in reply
to the Mayor’s communication on the evils resulting from the presence
of the Aborigines within the Town’.34 The index of the Council minutes
noted the ‘immorality’ of Aborigines in the settlement and ‘Bathing
within prescribed limits by Aborigines – disallowed’.35 In 1844 the
punt operator reported the ‘bad conduct of the Aborigines at the punt’,
depositing a long report with the authorities.36 Newspapers complained
of the ‘hordes of mangy dogs’ in the train of Aboriginal women, and
the ‘inconvenience’ of their habit of washing their dogs at town water
pumps. The Port Phillip Gazette reported that the ‘Chief constable com-
plained to the bench that the aboriginal women were constantly in the
habit of taking their wretched mangy hounds to the banks of the Yarra’
close to the pumps to the ‘infinite annoyance of the inhabitants’. The
Police Magistrate directed that ‘if any of them should be found so offend-
ing that they should be taken into custody’.37 The municipal surveillance
of dogs was an indirect way of proscribing the presence of Aboriginal
women in town. The new Dog Act of 1844 ensured that the ‘hordes’ of
diseased dogs, if unregistered, were routinely killed in the streets, with
dogs ‘tailed’, hung from trees and beaten to death. ‘Each police consta-
ble received 2s. 6d. for every tail brought to the police office.’38 William
Thomas wrote in his journal that Aboriginal women in one of the town
camps ‘cried for their dogs’, but later the women were given meat by the
butchers, unobserved by the constables. Such official actions that tar-
geted the dogs of Aboriginal women may be viewed as violence by proxy,
and they had the desired effect. A week later this Aboriginal group left the
settlement ‘on account of their dogs being killed’.39
In Melbourne, town incorporation and early efforts at sanitation
were used in the surveillance and segregation of Aboriginal peoples.
Foot police and the constant violence of settlers were also used to
move Aborigines on. Vagrancy laws were also specifically aimed at
segregating Europeans from Aborigines. Any Europeans found ‘lodg-
ing or wandering in company with any of the black natives’ were to
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 137

be punished with imprisonment and hard labour for three months.40

These concerted official efforts to segregate Europeans and Aborigines
were quite different from the various physical and discursive strategies
that promoted assimilation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, and therefore give greater meaning to them. In the minutes of the
Town Council, in settler accounts and in newspapers, Aboriginal peo-
ples were increasingly described as ‘inconvenient’, ‘wanderers’ and ‘nui-
sances’, impediments to the development of urbanising settler space.
Likewise, European travel narratives of the growing city often depicted
Aboriginal people as ridiculous and misplaced, implying that Aboriginal
presence in cities was anomalous and illegitimate. Indeed, in this new
spatial order Aborigines came to signify displacement itself for many
Europeans. As William Adeney noted in his diary after he had seen an
Aboriginal man and woman in a Melbourne street, ‘Met two of the poor
Aborigines looking almost like the inhabitants of another world.’41

The intimate urban: native camps, ‘mixed-race’

relations and ‘unwholesome’ places

There were at least six camps around the Melbourne precinct in the
early to mid-1840s. Despite official attempts to remove them, these
small camps shifted around on the outskirts of the growing town grid
until the early 1850s. In 1845, Protector William Thomas visited six
encampments around the town. There were 72 ‘Yarras’ at the east camp;
the south camp held ‘130 Barrabools and Western Port’; the north
camp held ‘36 Barrabools’; and another camp north of the grid held
‘176 Mount Macedon and Bonnyongs’. Another to the east held ‘138
Mogoollumbeek and Devils River Goulburns’; and yet another to the
east, ‘62 Goulburns’.42 Further out, Aborigines continued to camp along
the Merri Creek, at St Kilda along the bay foreshore, and northwest of
the town beyond Sydney Road at Keilor.43
Despite increasing attempts at segregation in the streetscape, the six
or so Aboriginal camps at the edges of Melbourne were visited con-
stantly by prying visitors throughout the 1840s. Europeans ventured
across the Yarra River on the punt or by boat to the south bank, to view
the main camp near the mission tents for amusement, or for far more
pernicious reasons. Sailors often went to the camp at night, anticipating
drunken festivities, and other men appeared regularly at night or day
seeking sexual relations with Aboriginal women and girls. Aboriginal
camps were far more than mere spectacle; for Europeans they were limi-
nal spaces of powerful allure.
138 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

In the midst of European town creation and attempts to regulate urban

space and impose colonial order, these other spaces – native camps or
fringe camps – were forming. The Aboriginal camp on the south side of
the Yarra River was an unpoliced site, outside of the emerging city grid,
and perceived by Europeans as a place of entertainment, drunkenness,
gunfire, violence and of interracial sex. Aboriginal or native camps at
the perimeters of the town were counter-sites to city space, which was
increasingly regulated by police and municipal orders. For some new
arrivals from Britain, strolling through the Aboriginal encampment was
akin to a titillating tour of the dark slums of London where the inquisi-
tive observer could be thrilled and appalled by the daily lives of the
lower orders. Despite the attempts of authorities, and vagrancy laws, it
was impossible to stop contact between newcomers and the Aboriginal
camps.44 As Protector Thomas despairingly wrote in his journal in 1844,
on the main camp across the Yarra River, ‘So many whites in the camp
today it was like a regular promenade.’45
The widespread sexual abuse of Australian Aboriginal women on the
wider colonial pastoral frontier has been explored, and the association
between lands to be colonised and Aboriginal women’s bodies has long
been established.46 As I have argued, the settler colonial frontier was not
an outward-moving linear abstraction, but local and internal, a sexual
and psychic transactional space, frequently in fringe or town camps at
the edge of towns and cities, but nevertheless equally violent. Yet, in
Australia’s mid-nineteenth-century urban landscape, such urban fron-
tiers were also hidden spaces, often left unmentioned in official munici-
pal archives and settler accounts, or politely glossed over. It is only in
records pertaining directly to Aboriginal peoples such as mission archives
that such relations are at times revealed. In all the Australian colonies,
as Larissa Behrendt has noted, prevailing notions deemed Aboriginal
women ‘easy sexual sport’, and Aboriginal women were frequently por-
trayed as ‘cheap or low class prostitutes’.47 In Melbourne, an extreme
imbalance between white men and few white women, and an associated
perception of a lack of good society regulated by the presence of bour-
geois white womanhood was apparent. There was a prevailing percep-
tion of shame in sleeping with a black woman, along with the notion
that ‘lying with a black woman would eventually lead to a whiteman’s
impotence with white women’, that is, the perceived emasculation of
white men.48 For some white men, however, the colonies provided new
and heady freedoms. On the Queensland frontier, as Nikki Henningham
has noted, young men wrote home to Britain reporting that they were
‘picking up colonial experience’, often a euphemism for the sexual
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 139

exploitation of Aboriginal women.49 Marilyn Lake in her consideration

of these ‘marauding white men’ has observed that the frontier came to
be understood as the ‘paradigmatic experience’ in the later shaping of
the Australian male character. Sarah Bunbury may have been confined
to her home space near town, but white men moved readily between
the zones of town space, native camps and pastoral frontier. On these
pastoral borderlands, freed of moral constraints, squatters and stockmen
told Chief Protector Robinson that ‘we are on the border and can do as
we like’.50 It is also clear that such brutal liberties could take place in
townships, settlements and associated fringe camps.
Contact zones are typically conceived as spatial sites, but in the
colonial past women’s raced and classed bodies were also vital contact
zones.51 It is productive to consider the conflation of bodies, spaces and
sex in colonial schema, for settler colonialism not only concerns the
collapse of space, the taking of land, but also concerns the creation of
new spaces and identities. Such thinking is in line with the propositions
of feminist geographers’ work on bodies, gender and space. As Judith
Butler has rightly observed, bodies and spaces are mutually imbricated.52
Echoing Butler, Ceridwen Spark writes on bodies and spaces and their
mutual relations, where ‘the body of the “other”’ has been essential-
ised, marginalised and constituted through a ‘set of violations’ through
colonialism.53 Aboriginal people were increasingly viewed as anomalous
in urbanising precincts, their bodies coming to signify displacement,
‘flashpoints’ in the growing logic of a new colonial modernity or order.
They were seen to embody the tensions and ambiguities of the frontier
itself.54 Such colonial discourses concerning the presence of Aboriginal
people could spontaneously provoke a typical, and rehearsed, frontier
violence from Europeans, and when it came to Indigenous women, that
violence was often sexualised.
Aboriginal Protector William Thomas frequently recorded in his jour-
nals the instances of white men venturing into the main Aboriginal
camp on the south bank of the Yarra River in search of the contact zone:
‘found a gentleman in an Aboriginal woman’s tent’, he wrote.55 On a
night visit to the camp Chief Protector George Robinson recorded, ‘[I]
gave two frocks to two little girls. On going away one of the girls said
“good night my dear” [I then] . . . turned a drunken man away from
them.’56 Thomas related the events of another evening in his journal:

Just as I was getting to bed I was interrupted by another apparent

gentleman, who came boldly up to one miam [bark hut] saying, ‘I
want [an Aboriginal woman], here’s white money.’ I despatched him,
140 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

who said that a black [woman] had a right to be a whore as well

as a white one, and I am sorry to say that the blacks are willing to
accommodate him. What can be done with these people under such
circumstances and what power have I? None.57

Thomas’ diary entry reveals the prevailing idea that in and around colo-
nial Melbourne Aboriginal women were synonymous with prostitution.
A lack of agency has been attributed to Aboriginal women in much
archival material, and on the frontier their ‘assent to sexual relations
[was] perpetually assumed’.58 As the night visitor to the camp perversely
opined to suit his own ends, prostitution was the ‘right’ of Aboriginal
and European woman alike, only highlighting the naturalisation of
prostitution and its inherent violence against both Indigenous and
non-Indigenous women. Further, many authors deemed the widespread
occurrence of venereal disease in Aboriginal peoples on the frontier and
around towns to be evidence of the wantonness of Aboriginal sexual-
ity. Aboriginal Protectors, who were clearly aware of the conduct of
European men, nevertheless described Aboriginal women as ‘contrib-
uting to their plight because they appeared to have within their own
cultural system sexual practices which deviated from those of British
Victorian practices which the protectors upheld as proper behaviour’.59
Clearly, however, in the native camps around Melbourne not all women
were willing to accommodate such intrusions. Another night at the
south bank camp, as William Thomas was about to go to bed, he heard
an Aboriginal woman cry out ‘“oh oh, hurt no hurt” [and] . . . I heard
a white man say “Be quiet, white money”’.60 He investigated and found
that it was the same white man, who several days earlier had pleaded
that his night stay in the camp was innocent, that he had come over to
the camp to see the corroboree and missed the last punt back.61
Ann Stoler has observed that sexuality was a ‘dense transfer point
of power’ in colonial relations.62 For Aboriginal women, this resulted
in multiple violations. Sexual violence and explosive physical attacks
on Aboriginal women by white men in the camp were frequent occur-
rences. As William Thomas recorded, ‘In the afternoon a drunken fellow
came into the encampment and commenced in the most brutal manner
insulting the [women]. He knocked one [woman] down with an infant
in her arms. We took him and I clapped him in the watch house, where
he had to remain till Monday.’ Later Thomas went to the police office
and identified the drunken man who had assaulted the women. ‘As the
assault was seen only by blacks . . . he was acquitted of assault and fined
five shillings for being drunk. The blacks got 2s. 6d. of it, which pleased
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 141

them very much.’63 As a white witness did not see this crime, and as
Aboriginal people could not give testimony, the man was fined only for
being drunk. The violent assault was not punished, only underscoring
the official sanction and legitimation of racialised and gendered vio-
lence in the camps, and also in town.
Although William Thomas observed the tenderness that Aboriginal
wives had for their husbands and children, Aboriginal women were also
victims of violence by Aboriginal men. As Thomas reported, ‘a black
man had beaten his wife and her life was despaired of’.64 Aboriginal
men also traded their wives for sexual favours to white men. In 1841
Thomas wrote, ‘found that Jack Weatherly was lending his [wife] to the
Splitters &c who are scatter’d about & inviting them to Encampment
at night’.65
Aboriginal women may also have brokered such relations with white
men on their own terms when they could. Often starving, as food
sources became scarce, and in search of ‘white money’ women did trade
sex for food, and cohabited with white men around the town. Moving
between worlds, Aboriginal women had some political power, albeit
within the confines of colonial asymmetries. Thomas wrote of a young
white man living with two Aboriginal women who ‘often entic’d [other]
young [women] to his home’. Aboriginal men in the camp complained
to Thomas of their wives in white men’s beds. Thomas gave a detailed
account of a search for the Aboriginal man Ninggollobin’s (‘Captain
Turnbull’s’) wife in the settlement. The Police Magistrate Lonsdale again
refused Thomas any police aid on the Aborigines’ behalf. 66
Evidence of such relations presents a marked disjuncture or disloca-
tion between the imagined and fictive ideas of racial containment,
purity and white settler space promoted by town boosters and bourgeois
metropolitans. Instead, early towns themselves were borderlands, and
mixed-race relations in settler colonies would produce new colonial
subjects as well as new, transitional spaces. Thomas wrote of a white
man who returned his mixed-race child to the camp in 1844, not-
ing that a ‘white Settler allowed his illegitimate child to live with her
mother and the Aborigines’.67 Yet, such incidents were rarely mentioned
in the official records of the colonial urban. On such issues William
Westgarth opined in 1846:

There are no instances, the Newcastle bench states, of the union of

whites with the female Aborigines, but the labouring classes are in
the constant practice of cohabiting with these females, and there
appears to be no repugnance on either side.68
142 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

In genteel company, however, such relations were barely spoken of, and
the Town Council and other official city archives are often silent, or
speak only in euphemism of certain spaces in ‘unwholesome’ states.
European diseases, particularly syphilis, took a great toll on the
Aboriginal population. Walking around the town as early as August 1839,
Chief Aboriginal Protector Robinson saw an Aboriginal family and sum-
moned the doctor. As he put it he had seen a ‘man, his wife and a little
boy. The man was extremely ill and had the venereal.’ The wife and son
were also ill with other diseases.69 In the native camps around the town,
Aboriginal peoples were also in a state of distress. The camp on the south
side of the Yarra River was beset with illness. Robinson recorded that five
Aborigines had died from dysentery, and ‘one little girl of tender years,
supposed eight years, was grievously afflicted with venereal’.70 After visit-
ing the camp the next day Robinson wrote in his journal of ‘each abode
of misery and famine’, comparing the state of dispossessed Aboriginal
people with Europeans benefiting from the escalating prices of town and
pastoral lands:

Land has sold in Melbourne for £1200 per acre . . . yet the original
occupiers of the soil are perishing with disease, want and the extreme
of wretchedness. This is a disgrace to humanity. How much more
reprehensible for a British government and for a Christian people to
depict the languishing look, the outstretched arm of the patient to
examine the pulse.71

With their aim to promote unqualified optimism town officials rarely

mentioned the disease and starvation of the expropriated Aboriginal
population and their constant segregation and surveillance in the
streetscape. Further, the anxieties of town promoters were only height-
ened by the emergence of native camps, other ‘unwholesome’ places
in the townscape, and mixed-race relations. The camps and the town
precinct were, however, relational and interdependent sites. The camps
were lures for whites, just as the white town was a lure for Aboriginal
people. New forms of conceiving social space inspired by ideas of the
‘contact zone’, ‘heterotopia’ or ‘other’ spaces, and of hybridised space,
are productive ways of understanding the lived, local socio-spatial
relations of the colonial city. Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’, or ‘other
space’, has been described as a way forward in apprehending ‘contested
heterogeneous social space’.72 As Foucault noted, such sites have the
‘curious property of being in relation to all the other sites in such a way
as to suspect, neutralise or invert the set of relations that they happen
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 143

to designate, mirror or reflect’.73 They are not necessarily sites of resist-

ance. Here, I suggest that Aboriginal camps were powerful ‘heterotopia’
or ‘other spaces’ within the nineteenth-century array of new sites cre-
ated by the processes of settler colonialism. Such camps were counter-
sites, which transgressed and undermined the imaginary coherence of
the British settler colonial city in the antipodes, promoted by town
officials as spaces of civility, progress, control and racial purity.
The main Aboriginal camp on the south bank of Melbourne was also
next to a large swamp, a place designated in the European imagination
as representing all things bad. Swamps have been typically viewed as
liminal, dystopian spaces, not picturesque, or useful, but wasteland.
Exploring the iconography and phenomenology of wetlands and
swamps, Rodney Giblett has noted their naming as ‘black water’, with
‘all its incipient racist associations’, and the persistent draining of wet-
lands by Europeans.74 Such ‘black waters’ have been seen as horrific
places, associated with death and disease. Swamps cannot be easily
transgressed, measured or allotted. They were gaps in the grid and could
not be easily converted into propertied, commodified space.
Yet, swamps were a place of plenitude for Aboriginal people, a great
source of food. No matter how they were configured in the European
imagination, the camps near these swamps were the homes of
Aboriginal people, in-between spaces created through the process
of colonisation, however temporary or violent. Sitting unsettlingly
at the edges of the Melbourne town grid, and across the river, the
Aboriginal camp for Europeans was depicted as the urban demi-monde.
Such places were viewed as sites of licentiousness, entertainment and
illicit desire, but they were also relational counter-sites, implicitly
part of and required by the settler colonial project. Settler colonialism
may be a project of extraterritorialism, that is, the expropriation of
Aboriginal peoples from their lands, as traditionally characterised by
the pastoral frontier, but it has also been a rapacious project of ‘gen-
dered territorialism’.75 Both processes occurred simultaneously, reveal-
ing the twin operations of the settler colonial project: the removal
of Indigenous peoples and their replacement through the bodies of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous women. As Adele Perry has suggested,
drawing attention to the mutuality of immigration and colonisation
processes, dispossession and resettlement were deeply intertwined, and
‘gender is where the abiding bonds between dispossession and colo-
nisation become most clear’.76 As new settlers moved into town space
and its surrounds, such processes were writ large in the colonial city
and its associated native camps.
144 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

Accordingly, the south bank of the Yarra River near the swamp was
not only reserved for Aboriginal people. It was also designated as place
for the lower orders, and the site of ‘tent city’, where excess loads of
immigrants were relegated. In October 1839 Chief Protector Robinson
wrote of the latest 250 immigrants, ‘all Scotch’, who had arrived on the
ship David Clark. They camped in fifty tents, and the ‘natives are camped
next to them’.77 That same night Robinson noted that Aboriginal peo-
ple held a ‘grand corobery [sic]’, frequented by local settlers and a large
party of the Scottish immigrants, ‘men and women’ related Robinson,
and ‘one Scotch man played the bagpipes’.78 Although Governor
Charles La Trobe had written specifically to the Chief Protector with
instructions to ‘keep natives from the immigrants’, at night large parties
of newly arrived immigrants would congregate near the camp to watch
Aboriginal corroborees, ceremonies which Aboriginal people allowed
visitors to view.79 The immigrants’ camp on the south bank of the
river was a transient space, a counter-site to permanent allotments of
the propertied town space for dislocated Europeans. Shared and cross-
cultural moments notwithstanding, Aboriginal people had very little in
common with these boatloads of newcomers, except displacement. The
south bank then functioned as a site of both dispossession and resettle-
ment. In these ways, the Aboriginal town camp at the south bank was
not a ‘natural’ entity, but was constituted in relation to other spaces of
colonisation. In this sense, native camps cannot be read simplistically
as sites of resistance, or as inherently underworld. Such fringe camps
could not have existed outside the relations of settler colonialism.
Instead, they were new, hybridised and uneasy spaces shaped as much
by Indigenous peoples as by newcomers.
The spectacle of the native camp resonated through colonial culture
in multiple ways. Sketches and pamphlets describing Aboriginal people,
sometimes in harsh terms, were sold to new arrivals, and often circu-
lated back to the metropole or were included in colonists’ accounts of
their journey to ‘Australia Felix’. As late as 1849, several native camps
shifted constantly around the edge of the Melbourne city grid, and in
the same year Ernst Bernhardt Heyne wrote home to Dresden from
Melbourne:

I can relate something about the Aborigines of the District, because I

have succeeded not only in getting some brochures about them, but
also because there was a large camp of them quite close to our park.
I visited them nearly every night. Probably there is scarcely a more
miserable folk living on the earth than these.80
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 145

By the mid-1840s the Melbourne Town Council had begun to pass by-
laws ‘to suppress and prevent certain nuisances which now may or may
hereafter exist by reasons of certain places within the town which are or
may become in an unwholesome state’.81 Were these ‘certain nuisances’,
and ‘certain places’ of an ‘unwholesome’ nature the Aboriginal camps?
In 1846 ‘canvas town and tent nuisances’ on the south bank and the
‘removal of canvas town’ were listed as items for discussion in the
Council minutes.82 Later, in line with Victorian fears of disease borne
by breezes and noxious ‘miasma’, and referring to the area between the
beach and town, the swampy area where the main Aboriginal camp
was located, the councillors ‘Resolved . . . to write to his Excellency the
Governor suggesting the necessity of clearing the land of trees between
the City of Melbourne and the Beach so that the obstructions of the free
access of pure sea air may be removed.’83
After the dismantling of the Aboriginal Protectorate in Port Phillip in
1849 William Thomas was the only Aboriginal Protector to be retained,
and was given the title ‘Guardian of the Aborigines’. While his state-
ment of duties was detailed, in practice one of his main roles was to
ride the town boundary to prevent Aboriginal people from coming into
Melbourne through the provision of free rations outside its boundaries
at the behest of Governor La Trobe.84 The discovery of gold in 1851
spurred many tens of thousands of immigrants to travel to southeastern
Australia, and within a few years they swelled Melbourne’s population
to vast proportions, only visiting further devastation upon Aboriginal
peoples in the region.85 By 1852 remaining Aboriginal people in the
area had increased their demands for land of their own, and this led
to the granting of two reserves for Aborigines 25 kilometres away from
Melbourne.86
By the 1860s in Victoria, many southeastern Aboriginal peoples had
been placed in remote mission stations, and relatively few were permit-
ted into Melbourne. By the late 1860s and 1870s many Aboriginal peo-
ple from the Coranderrk Aboriginal station near Healesville were afraid
to come into the city of Melbourne. As Richard Broome notes, by 1863,
only ‘7 reserves . . . and 23 handkerchief-sized camping places and
ration depots were in place, creating the most comprehensive reserve
system in nineteenth century Australia’.87

Interrelated frontiers

It is instructive to view frontier Melbourne and its town camps in the

1840s against the backdrop of extreme frontier violence and Aboriginal
146 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

resistance on the pastoral frontier. Whilst town promoters at this

time were invoking a vision of ‘stately buildings rearing to the skies’,
Aboriginal people of the Port Phillip region and groups beyond were
engaged in a sustained and at times effective guerrilla warfare through-
out southeastern Australia until the mid-1840s.88 European reprisals
were often swift and vicious. In 1839, after a visit to outlying stations,
Charles Seivright, Protector of the Western district, related the perva-
siveness of settler violence to William Thomas:

the state of Society in the interior towards the poor Aborigines is

awful, out of sixteen stations he visited he found but one (Mr. Airy)
humanely disposed to the Aborigines, 2 out of 16 he visited had
skulls of Aborigines placed over the door of their huts.89

Such symbols of death were no doubt mounted to induce terror and

to send signals of the assuredness of reprisal to Aboriginal peoples. An
estimate in 1844 of all officially recorded conflicts in the Port Phillip
area revealed that ‘since 1836, 40 whites and 113 Aborigines had
been killed’.90 Obscuring the high rate of Aboriginal deaths and their
under-reportage was commonplace, however. As one Police Magistrate
remarked in 1839, ‘A murder committed by the black is paraded in the
papers, and everybody is shocked; but there have been hundreds of
cold-blooded murders perpetrated by the whites on the outskirts of the
Colony, which we have never heard of.’91
Back in Melbourne, rumours of frontier violence on pastoral lands
and concerns regarding the ‘Aboriginal problem’ circulated constantly.
William Adeney, a man humanitarian in sentiment, wrote of this settler
violence, noting ‘our half savagised country men . . . are often guilty of
dreadful wrongs’. Stories of perverse and extreme acts of brutality on the
pastoral frontier were related freely between settled and pastoral zones,
such as when Adeney related an incident in his diary of an Aboriginal
women’s skull being used as a shaving box.92 These acts occurred simul-
taneously to the everyday brutality of other precincts or frontier zones.
Partitions between the urbanising and the pastoral frontiers in many
historical accounts are artificial, and often overstated. Information, peo-
ple and entrenched discourses of violence circulated between the two.
As demonstrated, the urban frontier was equally violent for Aboriginal
people although this violence was of a different tenor.
Settler narratives of gender as well as race were also played out
powerfully in pastoral and outer frontier zones. While European men
went to the native camps around Melbourne seeking out Aboriginal
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 147

women, a cultural hysteria amongst the European population grew over

the story of the captive and ravished ‘White woman of Gippsland’, a
controversy that raged throughout the 1840s in Melbourne’s newspapers.
This woman, supposed to be a shipwreck survivor, was rumoured to
have been abducted and held captive by Kurnai people, an Aboriginal
group in the remote reaches of Gippsland, beyond the pastoral frontier,
to the far southeast of Melbourne.93
This story of the white woman taken beyond the reach of civilisation
functioned as a compelling narrative in the settler imagination. The
white woman was a ‘potent symbol’ representing the fears ‘underlying
the experiences of travel to and colonisation of alien lands . . . en-
slavement . . . miscegenation, and severance from and loss of Christian
European culture’ writes Kate Darian-Smith.94 Significantly, orthodox
colonial hierarchies of race and gender were dangerously inverted by the
white woman story. As Darian-Smith observes, the order of civilisation
was ‘displaced when a Christian white female was placed in sexual
servitude to a heathen black male’. The spectre of the captured white
woman lost beyond the pastoral frontier thus represented a striking
discursive counterpoint to the figure of Christian colonial womanhood,
embodied by women such as Sarah Bunbury, safely confined in the
town setting, her honour protected and preserved out of the reaches
of Aboriginal men, and privy only to what her husband would have
her see and experience. The captive woman’s whiteness, Christianity,
comportment and chastity were markers of settler civilisation. And,
just as Aboriginal people were deemed anomalous to or incompatible
with town spaces of settler progress, the ‘white woman’ was a displaced
creature, inimical and anomalous to the outer frontier and the supposed
brutalities of the ‘Blacks’. Two expeditions, one unofficial and one
official, were sent to find the white woman of Gippsland. In town white
women were petitioned to contribute money to assist in her rescue.95
While in the camps around Melbourne’s fringe some white men
abused Aboriginal women with savage brutality, it was imagined that
the lost white woman, out of her sphere, was subject to the most savage
Aboriginal depredations and habits. The potent rescue narrative of
searching for the white woman, and thus redeeming settler civilisation,
was, however, used to mobilise a land grab. The search for her became
a call to arms against the Kurnai.96 Much Aboriginal country was
surveyed and ‘opened’ and many Kurnai people were killed in service of
the idea of the forsaken white woman.97 In these various frontier zones
race, gender and space came together in shifting and indexical ways,
and sexuality was indeed a dense transfer point of power.
148 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

Conclusion

As with the pastoral frontier, colonial Melbourne between the late 1830s
and the early 1850s, with its transient town camps was an urbanising fron-
tier. It was a vital contact zone, a place of gendered and racialised violence
and should be viewed as a continuum, part of an array of violent spaces
of settler colonialism. Fictive metropolitan ideas of a contiguous imperial
urban space and of racial purity were constantly subverted by the lived
lives and mixed relations of Aboriginal people and newcomers in this
urbanising colonial landscape. Despite concerted official efforts to segre-
gate Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in and around Melbourne,
contact with and abuse of Aboriginal women was an implicit contour of
colonial relations, where Aboriginal women’s bodies were also configured
as contact zones. Operating within the bounds of middle-class, female
gentility, white women such as Sara Bunbury and Georgiana McCrae did
not see, or chose not to record or acknowledge, such relations. The pres-
ence and movements of Aboriginal women in and around the town, the
political strategies they employed to survive, and the relations they had
with white men were also constitutive of these new social spaces.
It is productive at this point to pause and reflect on the mutual violation
of bodies and spaces described earlier, and the embeddedness of colonial
violence inherent in and across the array of new spaces created by settler
colonialism and its particular manifestation in gendered ways. As Tracey
Banivanua Mar has pointed out in her exposure of the violent structures
of colonialism and its manifestation in multiple and fluid modalities
through the Pacific Islander sugar trade in colonial Queensland’s fron-
tier and settled districts, there was a ‘logic of force’ where ‘violence was
considered a legitimate form of discipline, particularly for savages, and
to discipline was to civilise. Violence, in other words, was a civilizing
force.’98 Banivanua Mar points to the ‘structural assumption of violence
in the assertion of the civilising influences of colonial discipline and
order’.99 Such a statement speaks saliently to the notion of developing
urban spaces as ordered and civilised, where in town Aboriginal people
were disciplined through police, municipal and settler violence that was
authorised or tacitly condoned and deemed to be civilising.
In the new precincts fashioned through settler colonialism, an array of
spaces may be observed, both imagined and constructed in various ways,
but nevertheless interrelated. Developing city space was increasingly con-
structed as a civil, urbanising cognate space of empire, where civil codes,
sanitation, policing, municipal by-laws and notions of racial homoge-
neity, features of colonising modernity, were established. Within such
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 149

urbanising environments, an apparently rational, civilising and author-

ised disciplinary violence towards Indigenous peoples was enacted. In
associated native camps, where civility may have been partly suspended,
other kinds of violence, other modalities, were thus enabled. Viewed by
Europeans as alternative, illicit spaces, and places of mixed-race relations
and degradation, town camps were entirely constructed by the relations of
colonialism itself, and they were also the necessary homes of expropriated
Aboriginal peoples. Here racialised violence was gendered, and Aboriginal
women were its target. Meanwhile, the pastoral frontier, operating simul-
taneously, was deemed outside the rule of law, an uncivil borderland. This
was a place where often extreme forms of terror and violence operated
towards Aboriginal peoples, an apparently irrational violence seemingly
carried out in an unauthorised manner but nevertheless tacitly condoned.
It was also a fearful, imaginative space where Europeans believed a white
woman would be forsaken. In such a schema, constructed ideas of unruly
pastoral frontier and civil city space collapse; the city was not a civilised
centre to an otherwise hostile periphery. Instead, these sites, the gridded
city spaces, the liminal fringe and native camps, and the pastoral frontier,
with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples moving between them, were
relational and facilitated each other’s operations in the carrying though
and transformation of aggression. Here we see settler colonialism’s various
modalities operating throughout multiple, interrelated frontiers, underly-
ing which was a basic structural assumption of settler violence. Within all
such modalities gendered violence was not merely a symptom, it was a
systemic, motivating force.

Notes
1. Sally Bunbury to R. C. Sconce, 26 April 1841, Letter 7, PA 96/126, State Library
of Victoria (henceforth SLV).
2. See Ian D. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans: an Historical Atlas of
Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900 (Department of Geography and
Environmental Science, Monash University, 1990), p. 20; Richard Broome,
‘Introduction’, Aboriginal Victorians: a History Since 1800 (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 2005).
3. Ian D. Clark (ed.), The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector,
Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, vol. 1, 1 January 1839 – 30 September 1840.
Wednesday, 27 March 1839 (Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998), p. 22.
4. George A. Robinson, 20 November 1839, Public Records Office Victoria (hence-
forth PROV), 4467.
5. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Town Council, May 1845, 566, VPRS 8910/
P0001 and Melbourne City Council Indexes, 1845, vol. I, VPRS 8947/P0001.
6. For an extended analysis of the reasons for such scholarly neglect, which tend
to be reflective of imperial hegemonies themselves, see Penelope Edmonds,
150 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in Nineteenth Century Pacific

Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010).
7. Here I use the term ‘native title’ to mean a common law attempt to encapsulate
Indigenous title.
8. See Marcia Langton, ‘Urbanising Aborigines: the Social Scientists’ Great
Deception’, Social Alternatives 2 (1981): 16–22; Tim Rowse, ‘Transforming the
Notion of the Urban Aborigine’, Urban Policy and Research 18, 2 (June 2000):
171–90; Kay Anderson and Jane Jacobs, ‘Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and
the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography’,
Australian Geographical Studies 35, 1 (March 1997): 12–22; Kay Anderson, ‘Sites
of Difference: Beyond a Cultural Politics of Race Polarity’, in Cities of Difference,
ed. Ruth Fincher and Jane Jacobs (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), pp. 201–5;
John Fielder, ‘Sacred Sites and the City: Urban Aboriginality, Ambivalence and
Modernity’, Boundary 221 (1994): 65–83.
9. Beverley Nance, ‘The Level of Violence: Europeans and Aborigines in Port
Phillip’, Australian Historical Studies 19 (October 1981): 532–49, p. 544.
10. Jan Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers, 1834–1848
(Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1990); quoted in Tom Griffiths, Hunters
and Collectors: the Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Carlton: Melbourne
University Press, 1996), p. 109.
11. The complexities and intimacies of the settler colonial frontier across several
continents have been considered in the literature, for examples see: Sylvia Van
Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in the Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (2nd edn)
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Adele Perry, On the Edge of
Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2001); Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: the Politics
of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’,
Journal of American History 88, 3 (2001); Lynette Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers:
Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies, Studies in Imperialism Series
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking
Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United
States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006);
Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North
American History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).
12. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London:
Routledge, 1992), 6, quoted in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in
Canada’s Colonial Past, ed. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 2005).
13. See, for example, Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers, ‘Introduction’.
14. On Newton see Miles Lewis, ‘The First Suburb: the Melbourne Fringe’, in Fitzroy:
Melbourne’s First Suburb, Cutten History Committee of the Fitzroy History
Society (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1991), pp. 6–31.
15. Hanmer Bunbury to his father Henry Bunbury, Letter 12, 18 December 1841,
PA 96/126, SLV.
16. Patricia Grimshaw and Julie Evans, ‘Colonial Women on Intercultural Frontiers:
Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock, and Katie Langloh Parker’, Australian
Historical Studies 106 (1996): 79–95.
17. Brenda Niall, Georgiana (Carlton: Melbourne University at the Meigunyah Press,
1994), pp. 135, 155.
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 151

18. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 26 September 1839, p. 85.

19. Sara Mills, ‘Gender and Colonial Space’, in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: a Reader,
ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003),
p. 692.
20. Ibid., p. 698.
21. Penelope Andrews, ‘Violence Against Aboriginal Women in Australia:
Possibilities for Redress within the International Human Rights Framework’,
Albany Law Review 60 (1997): 917–41.
22. See Adele Perry, ‘The Autocracy of Love and the Legitimacy of Empire: Intimacy,
Power and Scandal in Nineteenth-Century Metlakahtlah’, Gender and History 16,
2 (August 2004): 261–8, p. 261.
23. Ann Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties’, p. 830.
24. Denis Byrne, Chapter 4, this volume.
25. Port Phillip Gazette, 12 February 1840.
26. Ibid.
27. The Town Councils of Melbourne and Sydney were made by order of an Act of
the Legislative Council of New South Wales in 1842.
28. William Adeney, Diary, La Trobe manuscript collection, SLV, MS 8520A, 296–7,
27 January 1843.
29. Hanmer Bunbury to his father Henry Bunbury, Letter 8, 27 April 1841, PA
96/126, SLV.
30. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 19 May 1839, p. 45.
31. William Thomas, Journal, New South Wales State Library (henceforth NSWSL),
MS MLMSS214, microfilm CY2604, 17 and 19 October 1839 (frames 36, 37).
32. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 26 September 1839, p. 85.
33. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Town Council, Meeting, 9 May 1845, 560,
VPRS 8910/P0001.
34. Minutes of the Proceedings of the Town Council, Meeting, 30 May 1845, 566,
VPRS 8910/P0001.
35. Melbourne City Council Indexes, vol. I, VPRS 8947/P0001.
36. Thomas, Journal, 31 October 1844.
37. Port Phillip Gazette, 15 February 1843.
38. Ibid., 28 October 1843. VPRS 3622, unit 1, G. A. Robinson, 28 November
1844. See also Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life (Melbourne: Australian
Scholarly Publishing/Museum Victoria, 1998), pp. 68, 69.
39. Thomas, Journal, 16–21 May, 21–22 May 1845.
40. Aboriginal peoples were repeatedly described as vagrant, but the charge
of vagrancy could not in fact be applied to them. Instead, it was applied
to Europeans. The Act for the Prevention of Vagrancy (1835) specifically
targeted non-Indigenous people. It stated that ‘every person not being a
black native or the child of any black native found lodging or wandering in
company with any of the black natives of this Colony shall . . . give a good
account to the satisfaction of such Justice that he or she hath a lawful fixed
place of residence in the Colony and lawful means of support and that such
lodging or wandering hath been for some temporary and lawful occasion
only and hath not continued beyond such occasion . . . shall be deemed
an idle and disorderly person’. Such persons were to be incarcerated in ‘His
Majesty’s nearest gaol or house of correction there to be kept to hard labour
for any time not exceeding three calendar months’. No. VI ‘An Act for the
152 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

Prevention of Vagrancy and for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly

Persons, Rogues and Vagabonds and Incorrigible Rogues in the Colony of
New South Wales, 25th August, 1835’, The Public General Statues of New South
Wales from 5th GEO.IV to 8th WILL.IV inclusive (1824–37).
41. William Adeney, Diary, SLV, Friday 27 January 1843.
42. Thomas, Journal, 1–9 May 1845.
43. Ibid., January 1849.
44. The Vagrancy Act 1835 targeted non-Indigenous people as a means to curtail
the mixing of Europeans with Aboriginal people. No. VI, ‘An Act for the
Prevention of Vagrancy’.
45. Thomas, Journal, 8 December 1844.
46. For example, Larissa Behrendt traced the extreme, sexualised violence against
Aboriginal women in colonial Australia and discussed such patriarchal
operations as antecedents to contemporary violence visited upon Aboriginal
women. Larissa Behrendt, ‘Consent in a (Neo) Colonial Society: Aboriginal
Women as Sexual and Legal “Other”’, Australian Feminist Studies 15, 33
(2000): 353–67; Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May, ‘Inducements to the
Strong to be Cruel to the Weak: Authoritative White Colonial Male Voices
and the Construction of Gender in Koori Society’, in Australian Women
Contemporary Feminist Thought, ed. Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns (Carlton:
Melbourne University Press, 1994); Nikki Henningham, ‘Picking Up Colonial
Experience: White Men, Sexuality and Marriage in North Queensland, 1890–
1910’, in Raiding Clio’s Closet: Postgraduate Presentations in History, ed. Martin
Crotty and Doug Scobie (Melbourne: Department of History, University
of Melbourne, 1997), pp. 89–104; Marilyn Lake, ‘Frontier Feminism and
the Marauding White Man’, in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 123–36.
47. Behrendt, ‘Consent in a (Neo) Colonial Society’, pp. 354, 364.
48. Ibid., p. 356.
49. Henningham, ‘Picking Up Colonial Experience’, p. 92.
50. Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land (St. Leonards, NSW:
Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 52. Also cited in Lake, ‘Frontier Feminism’, p. 124.
51. Pickles and Rutherdale (eds), Contact Zones, p. 1.
52. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York:
Routledge, 1993), pp. ix, 33.
53. Ceridwen Spark, ‘Home on “The Block”: Rethinking Aboriginal Emplacement’,
New Talents 21C, Journal of Australian Studies, API Network, St. Lucia Queensland,
(1999): 56–63, p. 58.
54. Fielder, ‘Sacred Sites and the City’, p. 67.
55. Thomas, Journal, 6 November 1839 (frame 115).
56. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, 17 May 1839, p. 44.
57. Thomas, Journal, 13 November 1839, cited in Historical Records of Virginia (HRV),
vol. 2B, 560.
58. Behrendt, ‘Consent in a (Neo) Colonial Society’, p. 355.
59. Grimshaw and May, ‘Inducements to the Strong’, p. 100.
60. Thomas, Journal, cited in HRV, vol. 2B, 559.
61. Ibid.
62. Stoler, Haunted by Empire, p. xii.
63. Thomas, Journal, 16 November 1839, cited in HRV, vol. 2B, 562.
 Native Camps and Settler Colonialism’s Violent Array of Spaces 153

64. Thomas, Journal, 14 May 1839 (frame 84).

65. Ibid., March 1841 (frame 24).
66. Ibid., 26 August 1840 (frame 72) and 15–17 November 1839.
67. Ibid., 9–11 July 1844 (frame 205).
68. William Westgarth, A Report on the Condition, Capabilities, and Prospects of the
Australian Aborigines (Melbourne: Printed by William Clarke, 1846), p. 12
(emphasis mine).
69. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, vol. 1, 5 May 1839, p. 73.
70. Ibid., 25 December and 4 May 1839, p. 39.
71. Ibid, 5 May 1839, p. 40.
72. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, cited in B. Genocchio, ‘Discourse,
Discontinuity, Difference: the Question of “Other Spaces”’, in Postmodern Cities
and Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995),
p. 36.
73. Ibid., p. 24.
74. Rodney James Giblett, ‘Where Land and Water Meet’, Post Modern Theory:
Postmodern Wetlands Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1996), pp. 3, 4.
75. ‘Gendered territorialism’ is a phrase used by Patrick Wolfe, ‘Nation and
Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis 36
(October 1994): 93–152, p. 95.
76. Perry, On the Edge of Empire, p. 19.
77. Journals of George Augustus Robinson, vol.1, 29 October 1839, p. 97.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., p. 96.
80. Ernst Bernhardt Heyne, letter from Melbourne, 8 March 1849, in Hamburg
to Hobson’s Bay: German Emigration to Port Phillip Australia Felix, 1848–51, ed.
Thomas Darragh and Robert N. Wuchatsch (Melbourne: Wendish Heritage
Society, 1999), p. 155.
81. Minutes of the Melbourne Town Council, 17 December 1846, 754 (years
1845–9) (emphasis mine).
82. Ibid., item 2246–82, 76, vol. 1.
83. Ibid., 967, 968.
84. Michael Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, 1835–86 (Sydney: Sydney
University Press, 1979), p. 138.
85. During this first gold rush year, 1851, Melbourne’s population was estimated
to be between 23,000 and 29,000, and by 1861 it had grown to between
125,000 and 140,000. See Peter McDonald on ‘Demography’ in Encyclopaedia of
Melbourne (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
86. The reserves were at Warrandyte and the Wurundjeri were given 782 hectares
on both sides of the Yarra. The Boonwurrung selected 340 acres on Mordialloc
Creek. Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 107.
87. Ibid., pp. 126, 144, 145.
88. Port Phillip Herald, 7 January 1840. Such guerrilla warfare reached a peak in
the Western Districts in the 1840s. Throughout southeastern Australia, from
the western district to Gippsland in the east, Aboriginal groups made sur-
prise attacks on shepherds’ huts and squatters’ homes, sometimes burning
them and taking goods. They often murdered hut keepers, especially those
who were known to have abused Aboriginal women. They disrupted stock
154 Frontiers in Cadastral and Urbanising Spaces

routes, and drove flocks of sheep off and in some cases carolled them in the
same way that whites did, using them for food. Often they simply broke
their legs. It was a clear message to the invaders who were seeking to take
Indigenous land. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, pp. 64, 63.
89. Thomas, Journal, April 1839, MLMSS214/1 (frames 44–46, 14).
90. Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Legislative Council New
South Wales, 1833, 1844, 1844, vol.1, 718–19.
91. Report of the Committee on Police and Gaols, Votes and Proceedings of the
Legislative Council, 1839, vol. II, 75 in W. R. H. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists:
Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s
(Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974), p. 24.
92. William Adeney, Diary, Melbourne, 3 and 4 January 1843, pp. 307, 309.
93. Sydney Herald, 28 December 1840. See also Julie Carr, The Captive White Woman
of Gippsland (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), p. 4. The ter-
ritories of the Kurnai/Gurnai people encompass much of central and western
Gippsland in southeastern Australia.
94. Kate Darian-Smith, ‘Capturing the White Woman of Gippsland: a Frontier
Myth’, in Captive Lives: Australian Captivity Narratives, Working Papers in
Australian Studies, Nos 85, 86, 87, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Rosyln Poignant and
Kay Schaffer, Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies (London: Institute
of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1993), p. 16.
95. Ibid., pp. 14–34.
96. Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Frontier: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-
Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), p. 48.
97. Captain William Dana’s official search party was accused of massacres of Kurnai
peoples after De Villiers and Warman, leaders of the unofficial party, found ‘a
great many skulls and bones’ at the Gippsland Lakes. See Kate Darian-Smith,
‘“Rescuing” Barbara Thompson and Other White Women: Captivity Narratives
on Australian Frontiers’, in Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in
South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall
(London: Routledge, 1996), p. 106.
98. Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2007), p. 122.
99. Ibid., pp. 122, 136.