PIONEER LEGENDS FRONTIER RESISTANCE

No Place for a Nervous Lady: the story of Katherine Kirkland in Port Phillip, 1839-41

Anne Beggs Sunter

INTRODUCTION
PORT PHILLIP DISTRICT - ALINTA AND BUCKLEY
JOHN BATMAN 1835
KATHERINE KIRKLAND
KATHERINE, THE ENVIRONMENT AND NATIONALISM

INTRODUCTION
One of the most interesting themes in Australian history is the development of a sense of nationalism.

When do you think people first thought of themselves as Australians, and not as immigrants from other homelands?

Over many thousands of years, the Aboriginal people developed an affinity with the land, and became part of the land. It is a challenging task to discover when white settlers first began to feel at home with the landscape of Australia. Often the obvious and everyday occurrences go unrecorded in newspapers or diaries, and it is difficult to find evidence for the awakening of a sense of nationalism, of ease and pleasure with one's surroundings.
I would like to present some evidence of early stirrings of nationalism in Port Phillip before 1850. The first white settlers, of English and Scottish origin, settled in
Victoria - or the Port Phillip District as it was known before 1851 - from the mid 1830s. Some of them showed a very rapid adaptation to the local environment.

PORT PHILLIP DISTRICT - ALINTA AND BUCKLEY
Through the film Alinta: the Flame, we enter imaginatively into the lives of a tribe of Aboriginal people living in Victoria in the early years of the 19th Century. We come to see the world through the eyes of a young Aboriginal woman, perhaps somewhat like the young woman in Scene 3 of Joan Makes History.
We were helped to enter into Alinta's life by the device of the white interpreter who stumbles upon the Aboriginal tribe, Mr McNab (Hair of Fire). The character is based, I fancy, upon a real person, one William Buckley, an English convict who escaped from a landing party at Sorrento in 1803, and after wandering round the edge of Port Phillip Bay, was taken under the wing of the Wathaurung people near Geelong, who thought the tall, pale-skinned man was the re-incarnation of one of their ancestors. The white men had landed at Port Phillip with the intention of establishing a convict station, but finding the land around Sorrento uninviting, they pulled up anchor and sailed south to Van Dieman's Land, and established the penal station at Port Arthur.
Buckley spent the next 33 years of his life living as an Aboriginal, learning the language, the customs of the people, losing his own English culture to his new culture. He became a member of the Geelong tribe, and took a wife from the Mt. Buninyong people, learning from her the names of all the features in the landscape .
Can you think of any other stories in which a white person is adopted into a tribal group from another culture? Why do you think stories such as this capture our imagination?

JOHN BATMAN 1835
This romantic tale of the noble savage was shattered by the arrival of John Batman and his mates from Launceston in 1835, bent on taking the reportedly rich lands of Port Phillip as a camping ground for profit - a giant sheep run. Batman, who was unusual in being Australian born, had grown up in the bush around Sydney, with Aboriginal children as playmates. He brought some Aboriginal friends from Sydney when he came to Tasmania, in search of opportunity and adventure. He made the startling discovery that unlike Englishmen, Aboriginal Australians did not all speak the same language. In fact his Sydney friends could not communicate with Tasmanian Aboriginals, let alone with the Yarra or Geelong people.
Batman was amazed to see Buckley walk out of the bush. Buckley gradually remembered his childhood language, and became a valuable interpreter between the Wathaurung people and the white settlers from Tasmania.
He did not like their policy of taking Aboriginal land by force, and asked to be removed from the scene of conflict. Buckley was given a pardon for escaping in 1803, and gained a soft government job in Tasmania, where he married an English woman and died some years later in obscurity, not before a reporter from the Launceston newspaper had sought him out and done a This is Your Life style interview which was published in the local press.
Buckley, by the way, gave us the Australian saying 'You've got Buckleys chance', from the fact that his odds of survival when he escaped from the convict work party in 1803 were thought to be incredibly slim.
John Batman was the first of a steady tide of white settlers to Port Phillip. Batman at least tried to negotiate a treaty of sorts with the local Aboriginal people, drawing up a deed of title upon which some local elders made their mark. However, the Aboriginal people had no word for purchase, the land being an unalienable and spiritual part of their being. The British, not even trying to understand the Aboriginal point of view, simply declared Australia terra nullius, and declared that as nobody occupied it, it now belonged to the British Crown.
The Crown at first did not want British settlers in the Port Phillip district, wanting to restrict them to Tasmania. But people like Batman came without approval when all the land in Tasmania was occupied. Hence the Government declared Batmans supposed purchase of 600,000 thousand acres from the Aboriginal people null and void.

Why was Batman's purchase of land not accepted by either the Aborigines or the British Government?

British attempts to contain settlement did not stem the flow across Bass Strait. Rapidly white settlers from Tasmania with their sheep moved out from Geelong and Melbourne in search of grazing land. Most of these settlers were young men.

KATHERINE KIRKLAND
Not all squatters or settlers on the land were men. A remarkable duo near Geelong were two lady squatters - Caroline Newcomb and Anne Drysdale, who gave their names to suburbs of Geelong and made a very successful partnership in a man's world.
I would like you now to enter into the life of a young Scottish woman who came to Port Phillip in 1839, just 4 years after the discovery of the wild, white man Buckley. Katherine Kirkland (1808-1892) stayed only a few years, but made her mark because of her journal which she kept and polished, and sent to the Edinburgh journal Chambers Miscellany which published it in 1845. Thanks to her journal, we have a detailed description of life as experienced by a young mother living at the very boundary of white civilisation. Katherine's diary provides us with a lively account of cultural growth and adaptation, of openness to new experiences, allowing uniquely Australian characteristics to develop. (Compare Katherine to the heroine in Scene 4 of Joan Makes History).

The Scottish Katherine readily adapts to her new environment, quickly learning to appreciate its virtues and adapt useful lessons from the Aboriginal people she meets.
Katherine immigrated to Tasmania in 1838 from Scotland with her husband Kenneth and baby daughter Agnes. Shortly after, Kenneth decided to try his luck in Port Phillip, and squatted at Trawalla near Beaufort in early 1839. In line with almost all British people of the era, the Kirklands gave no thought to the prior claims of the Aboriginal people to the land they squatted on, considering the local people as nomads and savages.
The Kirklands brought from Tasmania a menagerie of animals, including horses, cows, sheep, dogs, cats, a pair of rabbits, hens, geese, ducks, goats and pigs. The family had a rough trip to their property, which was deep in the inland at the time, and Katherine feared for her future, writing that the bush was likely to be full of the dreaded savages, whom I had heard accounts of in Van Diemans Land (P. 176) On the way she experienced her first corroboree, near Lethbridge .

In the evening we went to see a meeting of the natives, or a corobery [sic], as they call it. About a hundred natives were assembled. They had about 20 large fires lighted, around which were seated women and children. The men painted themselves, according to their own fancy, with red and white earth.
They had bones, and bits of stones, and emu feathers, tied on to their hair, and branches of trees to their ankles, which made a rushing noise when they danced, their gestures and attitudes were equally so. ...The women never dance. Their employment is to keep the fire burning bright.
The natives, when done with their corobery, were very anxious that we white people would show them how we corroboried; so we persuaded Mr Archibald Yuille to dance for them, which he did, and also recited a piece of poetry, using a great many gestures. The natives watched him most attentively and seemed highly pleased.

Thus Katherine's first encounter with the dreaded savages was a happy one, which changed some of her prejudices.

When you read an extract from an original diary does it bring history closer to you? Can you imagine being there? What words would you use to describe this early encounter between European and Aboriginal Australians?

A hut was hastily erected for the new family, and Katherine soon established a garden, planted out with seeds she had brought from Scotland. But she quickly learnt from the local Aboriginal people about wild foods which could supplement the settlers monotonous diet of mutton, damper and tea. She observed the Aboriginal women digging up Murnong roots, and tried for herself, realising the roots, which looked like carrots, tasted like turnips and were excellent in soup.
When her second child was born - she travelled to Melbourne for the birth - she again observed the Aboriginal women who carried their babies in woven baskets. She obtained such a basket, which allowed her to work in the dairy whilst still attending to her baby.
Her culinary art is apparent in her menu for New Years Day, 1841, when she served her guests with Australian delicacies such as parrot pie, kangaroo soup and roasted wild turkey, accompanied by carrots, potatoes, green peas, strawberries and cream from her garden and dairy. All this on a day when the thermometer was 100 degrees in the shade!
She describes an adventure with her only female neighbour, Mrs Scott from Buninyong. When travelling down to Melbourne in a spring cart, a wheel fell off the cart near Ballarat and the occupants were thrown to the ground. Mrs Scott was badly injured with a dislocated leg and was in great pain. She directed Katherine to pull her leg till the knee joint went back into place, then the injured lady, with night coming on, rain and a cold wind blowing, was carried half a mile to a shepherds hut, to wait for help to be summoned. She was laid on the bed - a sheepskin thrown over some bare boards - and given a little whisky to revive her.
The enterprising Katherine made a splint for the damaged leg by splitting up a tea chest and using parts of her dress as a bandage. She bathed the leg with hot water in which the mutton had been boiled, as this was the only water available. Then they sat through the long night, watching the rats run all over the floor and the rafters of the hut. Far from being cowed, Katherine passed the night observing the rats and describing their beautiful shiny fur. The next afternoon Mr Scott arrived with a dray into which the injured lady was placed, and taken slowly to Mt. Boninyong, where the doctor from Geelong could at last attend her. The story shows the courage and adaptability of both ladies, who were typical of the pioneering women of our district.

What sort of initiative did such women have to show as a result of their isolation?

KATHERINE, THE ENVIRONMENT AND NATIONALISM
In 1841 Katherine Kirkland recorded a visit to the Buninyong area. Boning Yong is a native name, and means big mountain....on the top is a large hole filled with water. It is quite round, as if made by a man, and there are fish and mussels in it. She commented that she liked the native names, and much preferred their use to English names.
The loneliness, lack of civilised refinements, and distance from medical attention were big penalties, but the women found compensations, notably through their appreciation of the natural environment, making their gardens with seeds brought from their homeland whilst at the same time appreciating the local flora and fauna. Some of these women became noted botanists and artists, like Emma Von Stieglitz (1807-1880) who had settled on the Moorabool River near Ballan; some left us their writings like Katharine Kirkland, and some, like Celia Scott of Mt. Boninyong, left us their gardens which are still cherished for their beauty today.
When so much of our history is written from a male perspective, it is timely to remember the contribution of these women to the foundation of our district. It is also worth evaluating their part in the growth of Australian nationalism, as evidenced by a feeling of belonging to and being at peace with one's environment.

Katherine lived for some time with her mother and in December 1843 her third child, Isabella Christine, was born at Glasgow. Later she moved to Argyllshire and to Cheshire; she died on 10 June 1892 at the home of her granddaughter Ethel at Waterloo, Liverpool.