Lorne Victoria Australia

The Gadubanoot

The Otway First Peoples were the Gadubanud (or Katubanut), though Pascoe has used the spelling “Gadubanoot’. As his version reflects the verbal pronunciation, I have therefore chosen to honour it through this story. Opinion does also question the correct pronunciation, but most seem to place phonetic emphasis on the last syllable, pronouncing it … Kat-u-bun-oot. As for the closest English translation of the tribal name, the lyrical epithet ‘King Parrot People links them forever to this spectacular, friendly, and worthy bird.

Gadubanoot territory encompassed what we now think of as the high plateau, the rugged coastline, the fertile valleys, and the sandy estuaries that we call the Otways’. Although the full extent of their territory is not known, it likely stretched from a spot somewhere along the Eastern View escarpment to the north – some say Painkalac Creek at the Aireys Inlet/ Fairhaven divide, though I rather prefer the slightly different, geological demarcation that links Gadubanoot country with the natural boundary between sandstone and basalt that occurs at Spouts Greek. In truth, we will never know.

More certain is that their country lay to the south of the arching sweep of the Barwon that then links through to the Gellibrand River and the Princetown flats in the west.

The Aire River, Cape Otway, the Erskine estuary at Lorne, and the Barham River flats at Apollo Bay were their undeniable ‘country’. Their habitat – with both rainforest and river estuaries – were ecosystems rich in food. Archaeological studies confirm that the Aire river region had been occupied continuously for at least 1,000 years.

Catastrophic convergences

It appears that in 1846, two or three catastrophic events converged. According to native oral history – though this interpretation may have been manufactured by white settlers as they attempted to hide their later culpable acts (see below) – the Gadubanoot were ‘wiped out’ in a war when neighbouring tribes set fire to their forests and made them expire through suffocation’

While this would certainly qualify as a potentially ‘catastrophic’ event, there are two others that seem as (or more) plausible. After all, the Gadubanoot had survived serial bushfire through the Otways for countless centuries past … so, why now would they succumb to burning and suffocation?

No … it is more likely that 1846 was a fateful year for the Gadubanoot for other reasons. 1846 was the year that the first serious attempts were made to penetrate the hinterland forests of the Otways. Most prior efforts had failed – until it was found that the Otways were, in fact, networked with a series of aboriginal walking tracks through forest undergrowth regularly ‘cleared’ by repeated intentional burning! Far from being cut off from all outside contact, the Gadubanoot had been communicating with neighbouring clans for millennia.

It was in 1846 that Superintendent (later to be Governor) Charles La Trobe decided to send George Smythe to survey the Cape Otway Coast. There was a clear and pressing need. Countless ships, lives and cargoes were being lost, year on year, from shipwreck and there was an over-riding need for a series of beacons to light’ the coast. Cape Otway was the stand-out site. But, Smythe’s ill-fated survey party was to trigger a series of more plausible threats to the Gadubanoot than suffocation by fire: they brought murder, massaere, and extinction.

Smythe knew the bush and had soon reached the Cape, but along the way, one of his party – a seaman James Conroy – was reportedly ‘murdered’ by the Gadubanoot while guarding stores at Blanket Bay.

Later, however, others would suggest a different story.

Smythe advised La Trobe of the incident and sought permission for a retaliatory attack.

La Trobe appointed Smythe as an honorary Constable and issued a warrant to arrest Meenee Meenee – the only Gadubanoot that anyone knew by name. While no one knew for sure if Meenee Meenee had actually committed the murder, he was well known to aggressively defend his people’s lands and he had ‘a reputation’. Smythe led a party of Europeans and black trackers from the Barrabool tribe and joined forces with another heavily armed posse led by William Roadnight.

Roadnight had already ‘taken up’ land south and west of the Birregurra and was seeking yet more land. He was skilled at a common ploy: he set black against black by arming blacks from distant aboriginal clans (eg: the Goulburn ‘tribe’) to attack the local Barrabool tribe whose country he coveted … land that he stated was ‘too good for a black’. He had found access to the Cape by an extension of Henry Allen’s original track to Forrest and had already pastured some stock in the Aire River/Cape Otway region. Roadnight knew the lay of the land, and he made a perfect deputy for Smythe.

When Smythe, Roadnight and their men – ostensibly in pursuit of ‘justice’ for the ‘murder’ of Conway at Blanket Bay – came upon a group of Gadubanoot, Smythe later claimed that he had lost control of the Barrabools who had turned on the Gadubanoot. A massacre resulted. After “skilfully’ using his Goulburn blacks to attack Barrabool blacks, now and in turn, Roadnight incited the Barrabools to attack the Gadubanoot.

Smythe’s report to La Trobe was later challenged when survivors of the massacre told a missionary that they had been shot down by the whites. Tellingly, they said that Conroy – the catalyst for the whole sorry affair – had been justifiably killed by the Gadubanoot at Blanket Bay after he had raped a Gadubanoot woman! That writes a different perspective to the story.

It is important to note that, at that time, indigenous law held rape as a capital offence, but contemporary English law hardly ever penalised a white for the ‘ravishment’ of a black.

There are several versions of the Blanket Bay affair and its outcome. One report, written some 42 years after the Smythe attack, is an article that appeared in The Age (January 8th, 1887) – a report that I have further edited here:

.. “there could not have been a better man for leading an enterprise of vengeance. He had family connections at headquarters. He had made a formal application to dispatch an armed expedition to bring in the murderer(s). Further, Superintendent La Trobe had authorised Smythe to ‘exercise his own judgement’. The very absence of instruction implied a roving commission, one free from responsibility to any single official.

Smythe and his party of six or seven men started for the Cape, taking with them a small number of blacks of the Djilong [Geelong] tribe as a tracker.

Early one summer morning, the avengers saw the camp of a little tribe deep in a hollow below them. The precise details of what followed have never been divulged, for the it was an article of the avengers’ pact that they should say nothing to incriminate each other. While no record of the event(s) have ever been published, the fact remains … with one exception, all the men and women of the tribe were killed.

After the killing, a young Gadubanoot woman was found crouching behind a tree. She was brought to Melbourne where she was adopted out into the Wurundjeri tribe. No statement was taken from the survivor, but even had it been, it would not have been admissible: given the law at the time and the pact of silence between posse members, it would have been deemed uncorroborated. Finally, and for the same reasons, the precise locality of the massacre was unknown.

Smythe did provide La Trobe with a cursory summary, but what could La Trobe do with it? To reveal the massacre would illuminate his own role in sanctioning the retaliatory mission. It would implicate him in the ‘undeclared war’ against the blacks that was being mounted by the squatters of Western Victoria at the time – a ‘war’ that the Colonial Office had expressly ordered him to avoid at all costs. So, he buried it. He hid the report at the bottom of a drawer, and there it stayed. This allowed Smythe’s myth of ‘savage murdering savage to become the official explanation.

But to return to the more subtle back-story to La Trobe’s pragmatism. There had to be a lighthouse at Cape Oiway. Again, the Cape was claiming countless ships, lives, and cargoes, and everyone agreed that Bass Strait must be lit. The whole success of settlement appeared to depend on it. A lighthouse had to be erected, the keepers of the light had to keep the light burning, and they needed to be protected while they did so.

In 1846, the building of a lighthouse at the Cape was a hazardous enterprise. The Otways simply had to be cleared of blacks. So, as best as can be determined, there were at least three major ‘campaigns’ on Cape Otway – and possibly four – with the number killed in each campaign ranging between 10 and 40. One of these slaughters was led by Foster Fyans in 1848, while the last – although further along the coast near Port Fairy – was reported in the Geelong Advertiser in 1848. It contains a particularly poignant sentence that reads … among the deceased is a man who belonged to the Cape Otway (Gadubanud) tribe, the last man of his race’.

There was one over-riding reason for the campaigns at Cape Otway to be more calculated and determined than at any other location: the lighthouse, the keeper, and his family had to be kept safe, at all and any cost. But, for the Gadubanoot, that cost was extinction. In 1846, the five Gadubanoot clans – the Bangura gundidj, the Guringid gundidj, the Ngalla gundidj, the Ngarowurd, and the Yan Yan Gurt – were among the last to feel the impact of white settlement. By 1848 – just two years on – all had been eliminated.

The Otways – a once thriving community

While La Trobe dismissed the number of people living at Cape Otway as ‘minimal’, Pascoe insists the earth tells a different story – though his interpretation does remain hotly debated.

Pascoe describes the entire Cape as one huge cooking oven and habitation site where Aboriginal people had clearly lived in large numbers. Indeed, there is some independent verification for this view. Some research by the University of Melbourne in the 1970s found evidence for ‘permanent dwelling foundations’. This archaeological work suggested that some of our Victorian aboriginals did indeed construct stone shelters of a kind, though these were often later intentionally trivialised by colonials as ‘humpies’.

Pascoe has also described ‘definable foundations’ and the footprints of aboriginal fish traps in Western Victoria, while a research survey in 2001 reported that the middens of Cape Otway form the largest unbroken sequence of cooking ovens found anywhere in the southern hemisphere. These findings have since been corroborated by others.

Pascoe tells us that hundreds – perhaps thousands – lived in the Cape Otwar region where food was abundant. While we will likely never know, reports from early squatters record that in the crustacean breeding season, the bays were red with crayfish’, the seas ‘swarmed with fish’, and the bush was ‘alive with game’.

But, by the end of 1848, all local aboriginal inhabitants were gone. Gone, too, are the light and fleeting footprints they left upon the land and its landscape.

Can there be redress for past wrongs?

Sadly, saying ‘sorry’ does not sufficiently assuage us of the guilt and wrongs of the past. Indeed, I am not sure that anything can. And, to add modernity to the obliteration, we have widely recognised and ‘named for’ so many who, while forging their colonial path into Western Victoria and the Cape Otway region, also drew so much innocent Gadubanoot blood with their musket balls. While the colonial settlers undeniably did establish “the coastal paradise” where we now nibble at salt and pepper calamari and sip our lattes, we have also loosely chosen to label the landscape with the names of many who were out-and-out rogues – and some who committed murder.

To our shame, we have entirely failed to recognise that our first peoples were simply struggling to defend and protect country that they rightfully viewed as in symbiotic and equal partnership with all flora and fauna – themselves included.

Where are the names of the Gadubanoot along our coast? Should we not think of them, name them, and honour them too? Might Blanket Bay be an even more evocative place if thoughtfully renamed Meenee Mennee Bay; might Mt. Cowley become Gadubanud (or Gadubanoot); Mt Sabine, Guringid; and the Aire River, the Gunawarra – the mellifluous Gadubanoot name for swan? Surely, this should not be too hard to do.

References

1. Bruce Pascoe (2007). Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country. Aboriginal Studies Press. ISBN 978-0-855-75549-2.
2. Wikipedia: Gadubanud. hutps://en.wikipedia.org/wikilGadubanud#CITEREFClark1995
3. Bruce Pascoe (2014). Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?
4. Lawrence Niewójt. Gadubanud Society in the Otway Ranges, Victoria: An Environmental History.
5. Gary Presland (1983). An Archaeological Survey of the Otway Forest Region. Environmental Studies Series, Ministry of Conservation, Melbourne.
6. Australian Broadcasting Commission: http://education.abc.net.aul home#!/ digibook/3122184/bruce-pascoe-aboriginal-agriculture-technology-and-ingenuity

Source:

• Lorne Independent No 218 January 2020, “The Gadubanud” by John Agar