White Settlement

At first they thought they were ghosts or evil spirits but they soon realized that these white-skinned and strangely-dressed people were planning to stay, and that they were. These “white-skinned’ people were in fact convicts who was shipped to do hard laborious work for their committed crime. Life before Europeans had settled in Australia was a very different place. There was either clear land and/or lots of bush. There were no boats, building or roads, in fact the Indigenous people probably had no idea there was such thing. This was probably why Arthur Phillip presumed the land could be theirs because no-one held sovereign right.

But the Indigenous people were living there. The Indigenous people lived happily and peacefully with guidance from their elders who knew local dream time stories and customs. They comfortable living together, helping and sharing with one another and stayed alive by eating animals and berries from the bush. They didn’t need fancy clothes, building or roads unlike the Europeans to live a good life. On the 25 November 1789, Captain Arthur Phillip, captured elder Bennelong and used him as a way to learn about the language and customs of the indigenous people.

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Bennelong willingly liaised between the cultures, and adopted European dress and other ways. 2. Victoria- Buckley and batman After convict William Buckley’s escape from the Victorian settlement he was discovered by the Wathaurang people who thought this pale, 198cm giant carrying a spear was the ghost of one of their leaders. Buckley had arrived at Port Phillip Bay from England in 1803 with about 300 soldiers, settlers and convicts after being sentenced to transportation for life. Before the European settlement was abandoned, Buckley escaped.

He wandered alone for weeks before he was befriended by the Wathaurang people. Over the next 32 years Buckley lived with the Wathaurang, learnt their language and customs, married and had a daughter. In 1835 he finally emerged to meet Batman’s colonising party and tried to work as an intermediary between settlers and aborigines, but felt he wasn’t trusted by either. 3. Overview of their decline and dispossession of land Victoria was originally the home to many Indigenous tribes that had been living there for a long period of time.

Although when the Europeans settled in Australia Batman planned to negotiate his way into ‘buying’ the land of the Indigenous people. Once Batman arrived in Victoria he approached the local Indigenous leaders with a contract, to ‘buy' their land. His negotiations were successful, and he walked away with 240,000 hectares of prime farming terrain – almost all of the Kulin nation’s ancestral land even though they were technically not eligible to sell the land as it wasn’t really their land.

However the transaction went ahead, and it was agreed that batman was to on a annual basis, give them 40 blankets, 30 axes, 100 knives, 50 scissors, 30 mirrors, 200 handkerchiefs, 100 pounds of flour and 6 shirts in exchange for the land. Because of this transaction between the Indigenous People and Batman the majority of Victoria’s population is, as the Indigenous people originally called us, “white-skinned”.