There was a real sense in which Van Diemen’s Land – it did not officially become Tasmania until 1856 – was ‘the mother island’ (Boyce’s term) of the Port Phillip settlement. Van Diemen’s Land was experiencing an economic boom in the 1830s, but, while the colony had some of Australia’s richest grazing country, by 1835 suitable land was in short supply. It was tempting for landowners and speculators to look across Bass Strait to the grasslands of the southern mainland, about which there had been encouraging reports. The Port Phillip Association, which gave expression to this hunger for new land, and which John Batman was representing when he negotiated his ‘treaty’ with Kulin elders, operated with the implicit support of Lieutenant Governor Arthur, who was hoping to persuade London that it was appropriate for the new settlement to be governed from Hobart rather than from the more distant Sydney. It behoves Victorians to remember this history, rather than laugh at Tasmanian sensitivity about its marginal status today, as when logos using a map of Australia casually dispense with the island state.

Boyce stresses that the easy access to the verdant grasslands that stretched from Hobart to Launceston – grasslands that had been the Aborigines’ hunting grounds – meant that the Van Diemen’s Land colonists did not experience the early hardships faced by the Port Jackson settlement. So, too, he characterises Port Phillip as offering the newcomers ‘a benign and familiar environment’; visitors were ‘astounded by the beauty and wealth of these grasslands’. Tim Flannery has suggested that the landscape of the Melbourne settlement, with its swamp wetlands, was like a ‘sort of temperate Kakadu’. The Yarra wandered through this luxuriant country, which was rich in bird and animal life, before reaching ‘the rocky basalt ledge’ near the present Queens Bridge, which conveniently separated the tidal river from the fresh water needed for the settlement. The swamps, of course, have long since been drained, the landscape refigured, and the Yarra watercourse straightened. But one of the points of this evocative re-creation of a lost landscape is to emphasise that, as with the Tasmanian grasslands, this was understandably a popular environment and resource for the Aboriginal inhabitants, too. Boyce also wants to show how, in both cases, there was little sense of the settlers facing the hostile and alien environment so often invoked in popular mythology. But some historians, such as Alan Frost, Tim Bonyhady, and myself, have long since sought to modify that literary cliché. Even given the difficulties of establishing the Port Jackson settlement, the charms and attractions of the harbour on its doorstep were self-evident.

Another aspect of the ‘mother island’ connection is Boyce’s claim that the real founders of Melbourne were not Batman, Fawkner, and co., but rather the Van Diemonian ex-convicts who did the hard work while their employers, the free-settler investors, were, for the first year or two, largely absentee landlords (though of course New South Wales did not recognise them as such). The Van Diemonians had acquired skills and environmental knowledge in their early occupation of the island’s grasslands, and these were valuable in the pioneering work of Port Phillip. Boyce also sees the ex-convicts as historical victims in so far as landowners used them as a convenient scapegoat for frontier violence.

When Governor Bourke, in Sydney, eventually learned of the Port Phillip settlement – Arthur had not rushed to tell him – he quickly issued a proclamation declaring any ‘bargain or contract made with the aboriginal natives of New Holland’ as ‘null and void’. Likewise, Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary, expressed the British government’s opposition to any extension of settlement beyond the designated limits of location because of the expense involved and because such settlements would expose ‘both natives and the new settlers to many dangers and calamities’. Here was the rub. Glenelg was active in evangelical circles, and the humanitarian thrust of the evangelical revival in the Church of England had contributed to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. The Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines was set up in 1835 to secure for ‘the native inhabitants … the due observance of justice and the protection of their rights’, while at the same time seeking ‘to lead them to peaceful and voluntary reception of the Christian religion’. In the light of these concerns, it can be seen that, in negotiating their ‘treaty’ with the Kulin people, Batman and the Association were hoping to disarm criticism that might come from such quarters.

Yet the initial disapproval of the Port Phillip settlement expressed by the authorities soon took on the appearance of a preliminary required gesture as it became evident that Bourke was as interested as the Association in dismantling the policy of concentrated settlement. They were helped by the appointment at this time of James Stephen as permanent head of the British Colonial Office; Stephen believed that New South Wales was ‘marked out by nature for a pastoral country’ and that it would be irrational to resist ‘the spirit of adventure and speculation’. It must also be borne in mind that the British government had already approved the Wakefield-inspired ‘systematic colonisation’ of South Australia, which was detached from New South Wales and proclaimed in 1836. Concern for the ‘native inhabitants’, not helped by the fact that the Select Committee had little information on what was happening on the ground in New South Wales, ceased to be a priority. The speed with which the squatters spread over the land, dislodging the Aborigines in the process, is remarkable: by 1849 ‘some 1019 squatters occupied nearly 17.7 million hectares in eastern Australia’. For a few years, Melbourne’s Aboriginal population increased as refugees from their lands came to town to receive food and supplies, but by 1840 they were being forcibly moved on.

Boyce concludes with a brief exercise in counter-factual history: could all this have been otherwise? He chastises historians for having accepted the historical inevitability of this rapid expansion of settlement. There were choices, he insists, in dealing with the squatters. For example, government had the power to deny title; it could also have denied squatters the right to convict labour. If George Robinson, Protector of Aborigines, who knew well the plight of Aborigines, had been frank in his reports and made ‘specific policy recommendations’, it might at least have posed a political problem for government. I am not sure how productive it is to ask these ‘what if’ questions: the historian’s task is to explain what actually happened, which can be hard enough. But what Boyce has done is remind us of the extent to which government was complicit in the process of land alienation, its apparent powerlessness a convenient excuse.

Almost in passing, Boyce manages to reopen an old dispute about the relative influence of the pastoral era and the gold rushes on the development of Australian society and culture. In his landmark history of the Victorian gold rushes, The Golden Age (1963), Geoffrey Serle argued that while it might have been true for the other colonies that ‘the diggers left a fainter impress on Australian life than the first ten years of the squatting age’ it was certainly not true of Victoria. But, for Boyce, the founding of Melbourne and the pastoral occupation of Port Phillip was ‘an extraordinary settlement story’, though the 100,000 he cites as the population of Victoria before 1851 does not accord with the figure usually given of 77,000. As he states in the preface, in making the claim that this was where ‘Australia’ was born (adding yet another time and place for that dubious honour to the many nominations we already have) it is in the sense that ‘Melbourne’s birth, not Sydney’s settlement, signalled the emergence of European control of Australia’. The claim that ‘Australia’ (clearly the inverted commas are significant) was born on the banks of the Yarra may be an unnecessary furphy, but Boyce has written an eloquent and thought-provoking book, which further develops the themes he creatively explored in Van Diemen’s Land.

CONTENTS: JULY–AUGUST 2011