Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution Read Online Free PDF

this growing generation of young people who had not been born in, or even been to, England. There was an increasingly distinctive way they had in dressing – sort of slovenly and uncaring – and of speaking – dashed ambivalent about pronouncing vowels for one thing. They tended to be bigger and more raw-boned than recent arrivals of the same age come from the motherland. They were darker for being more exposed to the sun and, while they were not necessarily insolent, there was a certain lack of automatic deference to their obvious betters.
    Most troubling of all, more and more of them appeared to identify more with being from the colonies than with being the sons and daughters of Great Britain! They were, in short, disloyal ingrates best summed up by an editorial in a Sydney newspaper in 1826, which put its finger right on the rough nut of the problem: ‘They have lost their English spirit and have degenerated into Australians.’
    This sneering aside, nothing altered the fact that there were more and more of these Australians, both born to that fatal shore and crossing the oceans to get there to make new lives.
    The inevitable result was that down in the south-eastern part of the continent the 60,000 years of sole Aboriginal occupation was coming to an end. In those mid-1820s, two intrepid explorers, Hamilton Hume and William Hilton Hovell, had successfully trekked all the way from Appin in New South Wales down to Corio Bay in the south-western corner of that massive expanse of protected water named Port Phillip Bay to find hundreds of square miles of what was clearly arable land on its foreshores, stretching into the hinterland, and duly reported their discovery to the authorities. A decade later, the first of those who had settled in Van Diemen’s Land, and had found the going tough, began to venture across Bass Strait – becoming the ‘Overstraiters’ – and found a place where the only thing that lay between them and claiming huge swathes of land were a few easily-dealt-with natives.
    One of the most significant Overstraiters was John Batman. A native of Sydney, born of a convict father of wild disposition – from whom he inherited his passions for drinking and womanising, though not necessarily in that order – he had worked variously as a farmer and bounty hunter, and in 1826 had even captured the infamous bushranger Matt Brady, known as ‘the Wild Colonial Boy of Van Diemen’s Land’. After tiring of farming without any success in an area near Launceston, Batman had thought to try his luck on the mainland.
    In late May 1835, having formed the Port Phillip Association with four other settlers in Van Diemen’s Land, Batman left Launceston with three domestic servants and seven Aboriginal workers and travelled across Bass Strait upon the sloop Rebecca . It was his hope that his Aborigines would be able to act as interpreters with the local Indigenous population so he could conduct the business he had in mind. For Batman did not want to just occupy the vast acreage of land that he knew awaited there. Not a bit of it. He wanted to buy it. And it was for that very reason that he was carrying lots of trinkets, some mirrors and many, many blankets.
    After entering Port Phillip Bay on 29 May, Rebecca anchored in a small bay about twelve miles into the harbour and Batman made the first of several trips ashore. Exploring the rich surrounding land on foot, he quickly fell in with fresh tracks of the ‘locals’ before coming across ‘a beautiful plain about 3 to 400 Acres of as rich land as I ever saw’.
    The following day he saw the local natives for the first time from a distance and was awestruck by this potential pastoralist’s paradise: ‘A light black soil covered with Kangaroo Grass 2 feet high and as thick as it could stand . . . The land was as good as land could be – the whole appeared like land [laid] out in farms for some 100 years back.’
    On 31 May, Batman’s Aboriginal scouts made contact