Warrowen massacre
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The Warrowen massacre was an apparent killing of Boongerong people by a group of Kurnai people in the area now known as the Melbourne suburb of Brighton in Australia in 1834, one year before the founding of Melbourne.
The main record of the incident is a second-hand account written in 1836 by William Thomas, the Aboriginal Protector.
The Yowwengerre clan of the Boongerong were camped and asleep when a group of Kurnai people from Gippsland surprised them at dawn and killed 77 adults and children. Warrowen, the name of which means "place of sorrow", is located near where Brighton now stands (modern day Landcox Park & Hurlingham Park, East Brighton).[citation needed]
The historian Marie Fels came across Thomas' handwritten record of this massacre.[1] Thomas recorded that "[the] blacks remember the awful affair at Warrowen (place of sorrow) near where Brighton now stands, where in 1834 nearly a quarter of the Western Port blacks were massacred by the Gippsland blacks who stole up on them before dawn of day."[2]
Fels writes:
In 1844, a party of five Europeans including Robinson, Sergeant Windredge of the Native Police, George Henry Haydon, another policeman named Keef plus six Native Police including Munmunginna, were pushing into Gippsland in an attempt to open up a road for commerce. As they struggled through the country inland from Cape Liptrap, Robinson recorded that it belonged to the Yowwengerre section of the Boongerong, now extinct, extirpated by the Boro Boro Willum or Gippsland blacks...This tribe once powerful are defunct and the country in consequence is unburnt having no native inhabitants. This is the reason why the country is so scrubby. The natives of Gippsland visit the inlet at Pubin.borro and other inlets in the snowing season. There must have been an awful massacre of these natives.[3]
In addition, Thomas gives further detail of this massacre in his description of an incised tree:
[They have] no monuments whatever further than devices on trees where any great calamity has befallen them. On a large gum tree in Brighton, on the estate of Mr McMillan was a host of blacks lying as dead carved on the trunk for a yard or two up. The spot was called Woorroowen or incessant weeping. Near this spot in the year 1833 or 4, the Gippsland blacks stole at night upon the Western Port or Coast tribe and killed 60 or 70 of them.[4]
An early pioneers' history of Brighton states that the Aboriginal people told early settlers tales of their tradition[clarification needed] in which a great tribal fight in the vicinity of Landcox Park, in which "large numbers" were killed. In the early days, settlers found bones and evidences of camp fires having been numerous at the place pointed out as the scene of the fight.[5] Another pioneer’s account mentions ploughing up bones by the earliest settler at Hurlingham Park.[6] These two parks are practically contiguous in East Brighton, in the triangle between the Nepean Highway, Hawthorn Road and North Road. Before being renamed separately by Europeans, they would have been the same place or space.
See also
References
- ↑ Blainey, Geoffrey (2015). The Story of Australia's People. The Rise and fall of Ancient Australia. Viking. p. 114. Search this book on
- ↑ Thomas, William (1849). Thomas Half yearly Report. unit 11,1850/55,PROV: VPRS 10. Search this book on
- ↑ Fels, Marie (2011). 'I Succeeded Once':The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula. ANU E-Press. p. 255. Search this book on
- ↑ Fels, Marie (2011). 'I Succeeded Once':The Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula. ANU E-Press. p. 256. Search this book on
- ↑ Cooper, John B. The History of Brighton 1842-1925. Brighton City Library. Search this book on
- ↑ Cheeseman. Cheeseman Family Papers. Brighton Historical Society. Search this book on
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