1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia

by James Boyce

In 1835 an illegal squatter camp was established on the banks of the Yarra River. In defiance of authorities in London and Sydney, Tasmanian speculators began sending men and sheep across Bass Strait – and so changed the shape of Australian history. Before the founding of Melbourne, British settlement on the mainland amounted to a few pinpoints on a map. Ten years later, it had become a sea of red.

In 1835 James Boyce brings this pivotal moment to life. He traces the power plays in Hobart, Sydney and London, the key personalities of Melbourne's early days, and the haunting questions raised by what happened when the land was opened up. He conjures up the Australian frontier – its complexity, its rawness and the way its legacy is still with us today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Australia, British Literature, Historical

299 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

I am an independent writer and historian who lives in Hobart. I have written five major books. My first, Van Diemen’s Land, (2008) was described by Tim Flannery as ‘the first ecologically based social history of colonial Australia’ that was a ‘must read for anyone interested in how land shapes people’. 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia (2011), that reimagined the cultural and legal context for the conquest of the continent, was the Age Book of the year in 2012. Both colonial histories won the Tasmanian Book Prize and won or were short listed in multiple other national book awards. Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World (2014), was published in Australia as well as the US and the UK (the Washington Post described it as an ‘brilliant and exhilarating work of popular scholarship’.) More recently, Losing Streak: How Tasmania was Gamed by the Gambling Industry (2016), was long listed in the Walkley Book Award, short listed in the Ashurst Business Literature Prize and won the People Choices Category in the Premiers Literary Prizes, as well as contributing to public debate about gambling policy. In July 2020, my first English history book was released. Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens explores the resistance by local people to the drainage and enclosure of the wondrous wetlands of eastern England. It is the story of empire played out in the imperial homeland.
My books are serious history written for a general readership. While I don’t compromise on research, I also don’t assume prior knowledge. My aim is to write books that can be read and enjoyed by anyone with an interest in the subject. I believe that history does belongs to us all, because who we are, how we see the world and what future we imagine, is all shaped by the stories of the past.

Reviews

[Steve lovell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The now exceedingly crusty former premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett, recently postulated that my island state in the southern seas would, in all ways, be better off becoming governmentally attached to Victoria. As one might expect, Taswegians united in their outrage at such a suggestion, but, to a thinking few, it made sense – economies of scale and all that. In the halcyon days of the Bacon/Crean years, at the turn of the millennium, it was all going so swimmingly – glowing economy, novel educational reforms praised internationally and supported encouragement of a vibrant arts/cultural community. Then, of course, came the GFC, and that combined with inept politicians, voluminous red tape, micro local government and the dastardly Aussie dollar blitzing that of the US, we are once more spiraling down to rust-bucketness. When our complete rescue package in the one basket, our shining light, the Tamar Valley Pulp Mill, recently went belly up, and with it, the final nail, it would seem, has now been driven in. Its demise, caused largely by an arrogant management thinking (much in the same way as in the recent super-trawler debacle) that the mill could be established in one of our iconic tourist/wine producing regions, and everyone would say ‘how wonderful’. If they had the common sense to put it out of the way behind industrial Burnie, as also proposed, then nobody would have 'given a rats', or at least to the same degree. Perhaps our salvation is, as the local paper, the Mercury, seriously suggested, to come by replacing the ovines and bovines in our Midlands paddocks with wallabies, and that could lead us out of this malaise. I like this idea – cut down on climate changing gas, and feed the world with a more than palatable product. It seems, for the time being though, our goose is well and truly cooked. Yes there is some logic in Kennett’s desire for us becoming a part of our neighbouring state across the water and, although it’s now hard to imagine, we were once that, but in reverse. And ‘the not giving a rats’ is one of the themes of Boyce’s remarkable book, which is in part about a Vandemonian ascendency, a natural sequel to his fist tome on Tasmania’s early colonial years. This ex-social worker, if not rewriting Australian history, is certainly redefining it – illuminatingly.
Yes, it is hard to imagine that this beautiful, if flawed, island was once the economic power house of our nation’s early times. The Derwent and Coal Valleys, along with the pasturelands of the Midlands, fed struggling ‘confined’ Sydney and surrounds, whilst its sealers and in-shore whalers created a rich micro-history, as well as early exports. When the central grazing land had been ‘squatted’ out, it was the entrepreneurial spirit of the Batmans, Fawkners and Hentys that, from Launceston, set a new course for our early history, gave it a good shake, and sent our embryo nation off on a narrative changing collision course. They didn’t ‘give a rats’ about the expedient protocols of the official anti-expansionist policy. ‘Australia Felix’ lay over the watery horizon and they ‘went for it’. The governing bodies in Hobart Town, Sydney and London then had to play ‘catch-up’!
For me, growing up, Australian history was, in strict order, explorers –sea, then land – first settlement, convicts, gold rushes, bushrangers, federation, and Gallipoli. Nothing before 1770 was worth mentioning, nothing after 1915. The ‘Black Line’ was the only smidgeon of anything to do with the First Australians I can remember, and I suspect this was only in Tassie. By the time I ended fronting a classroom, the average public school student ‘couldn’t give a rats’ about all this either – the Australian past, to them, was so 'gay'. Instead I told stories about our history, usually to do with a novel we may be reading, a celebration or something that had occurred on the news – definitely not labouring the continuum. I’d probably be sacked now under our regressive new generic curriculum, aimed at the top and bugger the rest.
But Boyce makes our history come alive to any to those of us that are still captive to it by choice. It had always seemed to me that the Gold Rush was the game breaker, the defining event enabling us to gain the necessary ‘pull’ to make the transition from a penal colony to semi-independence. It seems our author, with ‘1835’ marks it decades earlier with the ‘squatter invasion’ that stretched from Wilsons Promontory to Hervey Bay.
There is much that fascinates with this recounting, and much that causes sad rumination. Of course the losers in all this were our indigenous people, for, as the land grab reached its zenith, those pushing back the frontiers, in truth, did not ‘give a rats’ about anything that stood in their way. Once the evangelical movement, with its emphasis on protecting native rights, lost sway, UK and colonial authorities conveniently, and for some venally, enacted legislation that placed into law the death knell of any notion of native entitlements. Once at least given lip service in notions such as ‘Batman’s Treaty’, benevolence quickly became violence, and ‘war’ erupted in the Western Districts of Port Phillip. My island’s ‘Black Wars’ have been microscopically poured over, and the Nepean/Hawkesbury, as well as the Kimberley, conflicts have garnered recent currency. Perhaps none of these had the same devastation and lasting effects as the blood letting in this region, which received nary a mention in Wikipedia’s forays into our frontier conflicts when checked.
As with ‘Van Diemens Land’, with its tales of kangaroo economies and the necessary ‘freedom’ for felons to prevent Sydney-like semi-starvation, there is much to intrigue in this account. There is the bigger picture of the theories Boyce relates for the quick and massive demise of the Aboriginal population of Port Phillip. Then there is the micro-picture – just who was this Annie Baxter who, although sympathetic to the plight of the First Australians, nevertheless rode out on ‘hunting parties’? I scoured cyber-ether for more gen on her.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but reading the AGL Shaws and Manning Clarks of my university days was decidedly a chore, but a book by James Boyce is something to savour, ensuring that I, and many like me, will always ‘give a rats’ about our nation’s past.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a terrific book, and not just for Melburnians keen to learn more about their city.

James Boyce is a distinguished historian with an impressive CV, but the best thing about his books and writing is that they are very accessible for non-historians. He has the knack of writing history for the everyday reader without dumbing down. I like that.

To read my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2011/12/03/18...

[Alistair Paton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best history books remind us that little is predetermined, and 1835 pulls apart one of the great assumed 'forgone conclusions' of Australia's modern story - that an illegal squatters camp on the banks of the Yarra River would become an official settlement and spark the biggest and fastest land grab in the history of the British Empire. James Boyce reminds us that the momentous events in Port Phillip were the result of human choices, examines who made the choices and why and, crucially, whether they could have been different. His punchy style - short chapters but a new insight in every paragraph - makes his work very readable and gave me a new understanding of the city I live in and love - and what happened to the original owners of this land, and why.

[K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It didn't suck me in *quite* as much as Van Diemen's Land did, but it was still great!

[blaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting play-by-play history of the years around the settlement of Melbourne in 1835. Boyce argues the settlement of Melbourne was the fastest and most thorough colonisation effort ever done by the British Empire, and likely even in human history, as well as being one giant land speculation scheme. In under a decade the entire territory of Victoria was parcelled up by the wealthy colonial squatter/landholder class, the Aboriginal population decimated, and the settler population in the tens of thousands. All of the early settlement of Melbourne was done by Tasmanian landholders and ex-convicts - the two basic classes of white society in early colonial Australia. Many of the settlers and Government officials - both in the colonies and in London - had a genuine regard for the well-being of Aboriginals, but this was a well-being informed by a 18th-19th century British conception of liberalism. The main concern wasn’t the seizure of Aboriginal land, but how well they could be integrated into a wage labor settled economy. This quite obviously leads to devastation, and there were many still who had no regard at all for Aboriginals - squatters felt at liberty to perpetrate reprisal massacres for Aboriginal sheep or cattle raids, which in turn was a response to squatters seizing land. Boyce spends chapters establishing just how incommensurate the worldviews of British settlers and Aboriginals were, and how the life of each society was completely at odds with the other, not just in an idealistic sense but also in a basic economic sense of gaining the means of subsistence. Disease and guns completely destroyed the Aboriginal population, and those that were left faced starvation after the loss of their hunting grounds to pastoralist settlers. Most of the settlers failed to see the problem - if they’re not farming the land, then why can’t we use it instead? Further, the colonial government in New South Wales lacked the resources to actually enforce any laws limiting settlement or ensuring lawful treatment of the Aboriginal population. There are many passages in the book that demonstrate the slow-motion train crash going on here, yet Boyce feels the need to save face in the final chapter by wagging a finger at anyone suggesting there was some determined element to how the colonisation played out. He adopts a sort of left-liberal position here, suggesting that no matter how far deep one is in a particular social or historical context, one still has the capacity to choose to act otherwise. I hold a different view: people for the most part are caught in power dynamics beyond their control or knowledge, and that these power dynamics - and the institutions they work through - have consequences beyond the will of any particular individuals that constitute them. If there isn’t some outside power to countervail it, the train keeps moving. Boyce points to the comparatively better treatment of indigenous people in the colonisations of New Zealand, South Africa, and North America, but fails to mention the fact that in these areas the British faced considerable organised military force by the native populations (often with guns themselves), one or more other colonial powers, or both. It’s a result of these power dynamics that rights arise between conqueror and conquered. It’s unfeeling and inhuman - or perhaps human, all too human, as Nietzsche would say - but such has power operated and such will power operate. Boyce’s sort of left-liberal stance is ignorant of the fundamental role power plays in political life, and slips up as a result. He even goes as far as saying that it doesn’t matter if the colonial governments couldn’t actually enforce the law on the frontiers if they just ramped up their rhetoric, but I fail to see how that would have worked much differently. I have to give him props for the accessibility of his writing, the ease of his narrative structure, and the level of his research in primary sources, but the milquetoast moralising at the end left a sour taste. Perhaps he felt the need to add it due to the mores of the cultural milieu of which he, as an academic, is part of. Still, I’d recommend it for a good introduction to early Melbournian and Victorian history.

[Amanda Witt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting, detailing how the settlers forced out the indigenous, and how the latter group was largely killed by violence and introduced diseases.

[Michael Durkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Boyce, writer and good story teller, historian telling a past that speaks for generations of aborigines and our environment.
This is easy reading history, deep thoughtful and important. Melbourne & Australia know yourself. The cultural cringe maybe ignorant guilt.

[A.E. Cochrane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely brilliant book that is the most clear sighted view of Melbourne and Victoria's history that I know. It presents the colonisation of Victoria as the most rapid and complete takeover of a territory this size in all of history - a startling fact that hasn't been spelt out in anything else I've read.

[Serena]

Read for University. Great source for Australian History essays.
Explores Colonial settlements of NSW, Victoria and Tasmania as well as the frontier violence and slaughter which subsequently occurred .
Discusses Batman's Treaty and cross cultural encounters between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians.

Would recommend for anyone studying Indigenous Studies or Australian Studies.

[David Hunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most cogent and well-written book you will find on the rise of the Australian squatocracy and the rapid dispossession of indigenous Australians and the policy decisions and non-decisions that enabled the world's most rapid land grab.

[Jonathan Steffanoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the founding of Melbourne, with perspectives from Hobart, Sydney, London and the Kulin nation. Easy to read, and concise while covering a lot of material. A really great read for any Australian!

[Andreas Sekeris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended for an insight into how Melbourne came to be. Especially if you live here, getting an insight into the various decisions people made that impacted how the city came to be. It wasn't unstoppable progress. It was people wanting land for their sheep, who had been restricted elsewhere, but tried their luck and found an empire willing to look the other way. Incredibly sad details around interactions with First Nations people, especially realising the intial treaty that Batman got seems obviously intended to cover a small group, not all of England. Read it!

[Roger Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enlightening. What you never learnt in school about Australian history. Lots of shameful acts in the founding of Victoria. I am no longer surprised though. The despoiling of native culture by our founders occurred all over the country. Boyce have just documented it in a dispassionate and thorough way for the case of Victoria (as he did, and just as effectively, for Tasmania in his previous masterpiece "Van Diemans Land").

[Theo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good and interesting read that made a lot of things clearer about how the first peoples around Melbourne were systematically removed and why the usual excuses for this simply don't hold water. I was surprised at how many people in the mid-19th Century were already aware how the Aboriginal people were being destroyed and how badly we treated the country.

[Bruce Hunter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all good history books, it gets you thinking about the present.
I was particularly touched by the author’s focus on the plight of the local aborigines. How quickly we destroyed a way of life that stretched back millennia. How profound the destruction and how hidden from modern view. We were not alone.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knowing very little about the colonisation of Australia and absolutely nothing about Melbourne in particular, this was an eye-opening book. Bought while visiting, it brought vividly to life the beginnings of this now multicultural global city. Many thanks for the recommendation to the member of staff at the Melbourne Immigration Museum, who gave me the tip!

[Julian Burgess · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding account of the Van Demonians who settled the Yarra and founded Victoria.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learnt a little, yes, but my mind drifted distractedly alongside evermore dry descriptions.

[Peter Wassam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, empathetic overview of the founding of Melbourne.

[Benjamin Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that solidifies the importance of sheep and private enterprise in our mid-colonial history.

[Ned Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

An easy to read book with some interesting facts on the founding of Melbourne.
The introduction on the back cover is not an indication of the book's content. Primarily the book dabbles with the effect on the aborigines of the arrival of the British in Port Phillip. This unbiased and simple account deals very little with the development of Melbourne or the colony, nor does it support an argument from either the aborigine or the white man.
The white man came initially from Tasmania where he had experienced disastrous attempts of co-habitation with the aborigine. In general terms, the white man wanted the attractive farming land and the aborigine who was totally unprepared, physically and mentally was torn between accepting hand-outs and protecting his land.
The government and a number of individuals saw the problems but efforts to rectify them were feeble and inconsistent. To say the government was powerless to effectively regulate the invasion is new to me. My 67 years of education has always viewed it as a ‘land grab’ in a similar scenario to the white man in North America. The British after all, were very experienced invaders.
While the book offers little in the form of answers, it does provide food for thought.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was quite an eye-opener in terms of clearly explaining how Aboriginals were unfairly treated and nearly wiped out during the years when Melbourne was being established. It was interesting to see how the people governing at the time would use various techniques to give the appearance that they cared about the plight of the native people, while there was never anything of real substance to back up these ideas.

Most of the people who have streets named after them in Melbourne have some sort of blood on their hands after you read some parts of this book.

The author gave some really good insight into the politics and world affairs of the time, which is critical to understanding how things progressed in Melbourne. First of all, a group of people basically illegally landed there and then the government eventually hopped on board the gravy train. The result was a huge land rush (that pre-dates the gold rush which would follow in the 1850s).

One of the more interesting aspects was how land was used in the past when land grants were bing established around Melbourne in the 1830s - in the UK, you could lease land, but you also had to respect common rights of other people, such as walkers, hunters and people who go fishing. It appears that the land grants in Victoria may have initially had the same intention, but everything has since got mucked up under our modern way of looking at land - land holders have full rights of the land over everyone else. It would be interesting to see whether the decision makers at the time would have allowed things to progress in the same way if they could see the future.

[Cate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't mind this. I'd give it 3.5 stars really. I think I was more expecting a history of Melbourne but what I got was a pointed account of the colonisation process and the imperatives that drove the expansion of white settlement into Port Phillip. Boyce gives an account of the pointy end colonisation ie a bloody great land grab. it was quite a gut wrenching account of the impact of this on the Aboriginal communities. There is great pause for thought over that aspect of our history. Boyce makes the point that this was a deliberate policy choice peculiar to the Australian context. And that it is a choice that needs to be acknowledged as it has had profound consequences for both Aboriginal people and Australia as a whole: "Could there be a connection btween the ingrained assumption that the squatter conquest of Australia could not have been slowed down and properly regulated, and the national difficulty in imagining governments might do the same to coalminers today? If Guy Pearse is right that it is our inability to imagine something different which is digging us deeper into danger as the immensity of the climate crisis hits home, then it is not Aborigines alone who live with the dangerous legacy of the political decisions made after the founding of Melbourne in 1835". A clarion call to interventionist government - radical stuff in this laissez faire age.

[Lyndal Simpson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was champing at the bit to read this. I love history, especially Australian history and even more especially the history of my home state - Victoria. Unfortunately this book didn't quite live up to my expectations.

The main focus of the text was on the policy decisions in regards to colonisation, the men who influenced them, and the devastating effects of rapid settlement by squatters on the local Aboriginal population. All of the information was there and it was enlightening, but the narrative style was...dull. It was a hard slog to get through as the whole thing read like a text book.
I was also disappointed at how the city of Melbourne itself was almost entirely overlooked. The focus was on the open grasslands of Victoria and the goings-on there. There were very few details about 1830's Melbourne. The only notable ones were that the streets were full of shit, the houses constructed from varying building materials, and the Yarra river grew quickly polluted and fostered disease. In addition to these rather obvious facts that would probably apply to almost any growing city anywhere, there was also reference to the influential men that some of Melbourne's best-known streets are named after. That was about it.
It wasn't bad. It just wasn't great.

[Maxy.kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

It wasn't until the last chapter that I really appreciated what Boyce was trying to do with this book. It's essentially a story of how political decisions formed the basis for the devastating colonisation of Victoria- in contrast to the usual story of squatters and unrestrained land grabbing forcing the government's hand. Very good.

[Caroline Mckean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This should be part of the curriculum of Australian Secondary schools. Familiar names (like Batman) are exposed as cruel opportunists. This is a fascinating glimpse at the political dynamics at play and the struggle of the traditional owners, in the rush for land during colonisation. This is a compelling, insightful read.

[Loki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the first few years of the Melbourne colony, and the battles between capital and government, between settler and native, between propaganda and truth, that characterised it. A useful corrective to the rather less detailed and more idealised version still taught in our primary and secondary schools.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Just a little hard to keep track of who's who and what's what. Maybe written with the assumption that the reader is Australian or knows Australian history. But overall a great illustration of how the white west took over and threw utterly out of balance the aboriginal lands down under.

[Hamish · Rating 2 out of 5]

quite interesting yet a bit dull all at the same time

[Robert Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Boyce's book outlines the early settlement of Melbourne and the legal and moral issues which are its legacy. A great read and excellent work on Australian history.