Book Description

Sounding 6 begins with Bain Attwood’s thesis Blacks & Lohans and an echo titled SEX & SORROW EAST OF MELBOURNE. Then Henry Meyrick’s frontier life and death in Western Port and Gipps Land leads into Echo 93: TAMING MELBOURNE BAYSIDE & THE DANDENONGS. Turning to OPENING GIPPSLAND: elite squatters at Sale are contrasted by surviving Kooris on Jackson’s Track. The narrative then backtracks in time with Echo 95: CONTRIBUTIONS TO TRUTH ABOUT SLAUGHTER IN GIPPSLAND comprising the Porter, Cox, Fels and Gardner versions of the blood-stained land-grab. Fels then reports on the Native Police actions and Morgan’s recent overview of the Ganai before and after white settlement concludes the shameful issues long denied or excused. Echo 96: LIAR’S LUNCH charts the rise and fall of pioneer Angus McMillan MP before the focus shifts to the historical geography of East Gippsland clans and languages and on to missionary Bulmer at Lake Tyers with the stories of the payback of Hopping Kitty and Attwood’s study of Brataualung man Tarra Bobby. Alfred Howitt’s birthing of Oz anthropology with his opus The Native Tribes of South-east Australia published at the start of the 20th century is the source material of several echoes on the making of ‘clever’ men and on songs and song-makers. Sounding 6 closes with extracts reprinted from Professor Elkin’s Aboriginal Men of High Degree – their personality and ‘making’, the powers of medicine men, and in conclusion Echo 106: ABORIGINAL MEN OF HIGH DEGREE IN A CHANGING WORLD.