The Apocalypse in the South: Fison in Victoria and Fiji

Abstract

In the early 1850s, as Morgan was publishing League of the Iroquois (1851), Lorimer Fison and Alfred William Howitt were disembarking at the gold-drunk town of Melbourne in the new Australian colony of Victoria. It was less than twenty years since John Batman had led the Port Phillip Association from Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) to claim the vast grasslands of the south-east of the continent. Batman’s treaty with the Kulin elders of the Aboriginal people of the region sought access for his own sheep and cattle and his wife and seven daughters, but was quickly broken.¹ Within two years of Batman’s arrival, graziers forced their way to the border with South Australia, some 250 miles distant.² In this relentless invasion, the Aboriginal peoples of the colony were driven from their lands. A catastrophic collapse of their popula-tion followed as they died of violence, new diseases or destitution.³ The Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung people, whose country was taken for Melbourne town, maintained a presence on the outskirts throughout the 1840s but were ravaged by successive epidemics and the chaos of lands lost.⁴