Book Description

The first white intruders in the area north of the Great Divide to the Murray River drained by the Goulburn, Loddon and Wimmera rivers were cattle and sheep ‘overlanders’ from the Sydney-side searching for green pastures in drought-affected NSW and a route to South Australia. Echo 76: THE NORTHERN CONQUEST – Drover’s accounts of overlanding sets the scene for the later Echo 83: REVIEWING THE FAITHFULL MASSACRE, WANGARATTA AND SCOURING THE OVENS. With a military escort, the wife of the Governor of VD Land Lady Jane Franklin wrote travel diaries and letters of her visit to Melbourne and ‘tour’ of Australia Felix in 1839. Sounding 5 introduces the journals of Protector Dredge camping with the Goulburn clans and is followed by Echo 79: THE HUTTON & MUNRO AFFAIRS, being the invasion of Djadja Wurrung country as revealed in Chief Protector Robinson’s journal for January 1840. This leads into Parker’s Mount Franklin Protectorate Station combined with shire history snippets of Maryborough, Avoca and Boort before a section on the Djadja Wurrung who survived colonization. Another group of shire histories cover Kyabram, Shepparton, Murchison, Benalla, Tallangatta, Benambra and Bendigo areas before Ian D Clark’s depiction of the box-ironbark forests and pre-1840s Aboriginal land tenure in north-central Victoria. Included here is an ecological section on ‘fire-stick farming’ replaced by agri-business. The fate of the Goulburn tribe, the Taungurong clans, and pioneer Carter’s early days on the Wimmera lead to echo 87: ORIENTING THE WERGAIA WIMMERA-MALLEE CLANS and then to EBENEZER – archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission Station. Sounding 5 closes with an echo on the bush-life experiences of battler William Kyle and for contrast reveals the dispossession role played by wealthy land speculators in echo 90: BEN BOYD – Royal Yacht Squadron Slaver.