At first killing field, waves of spirits move

Chris Saunders, a young Gunditjmara man, stood with his feet washed by Portland Bay and asked for a short silence.

It was in acknowledgment of those who had gone, he said, their spirits transported far out across the bay to an island known to Indigenous people as Deen Maar, or Dhinmar, and to Europeans as Lady Julia Percy Island.

Plenty of spirits had taken leave from this very beach in Victoria’s far south-west.

Mr Saunders was standing on the land of his ancestors at a place called the Convincing Ground: the site of the first massacre of Aboriginal people by Europeans.

An unknown number of Indigenous people were killed by whalers in 1833 or 1834 in a dispute about ownership of a beached whale.

The story was documented by Victoria’s Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, after hearing of it in 1841 from one of the earliest white settlers in Portland, Edward Henty.

The whalers, Mr Henty had told him, had used their guns to ‘‘convince’’ the Aboriginal people that the whale was not theirs. By the time Mr Robinson heard the story, he recorded that just two young men from the entire clan that occupied the whaling ground remained alive.

But the truth lay ignored and covered up for more than a century and a half until modern historians turned their attention to it.

Knowledge of the atrocity, however, was passed down by the Gunditjmara. Several years ago Mr Saunders, of nearby Heywood, began organising smoking ceremonies on the beach each January 26, a date he and his people call Invasion Day.

At first, only a handful of Indigenous people turned up.

But yesterday, almost 300 people attended – many from the local white population.

‘‘At first, it was just family and elders,’’ Mr Saunders said. ‘‘But now, it’s shifted to include the wider community, which we wanted to see all along.

‘‘With things like this, with community discussions and so on, it shows the community’s mind is opening up. I don’t lecture or shove the stories at people. I’m asking people to do their own research to learn the truth.’’

Rawleigh Cox said he had come to the ceremony to learn. He and his wife Emma had brought their two sons, Clayton, 11, and Mason, three, because they believed it was important that the next generation learn, too.

Mr Cox, who has spent all his life in the Portland district, said he had never been taught the Indigenous history, even though he was of Wurundjeri ancestry, and had never heard the dreaming story of Deen Maar before the smoking ceremony.

Earlier, a ‘‘secret’’ dawn ceremony was held at the beach for traditional owners.

Later in the morning, the Gunditjmara moved to Portland, where they held another smoking ceremony for the wider community at an area known as ‘‘the Ploughed Ground’’.

The area is claimed to be the spot where the Henty family first ploughed the land, introducing farming to Victoria, and includes a memorial stone ‘‘in commemoration of the discovery of Portland Bay by Lt James Grant’’ in 1800.

But Mr Saunders said it should also be acknowledged that the Gunditjmara had lived in the area for thousands of years before Lieutenant Grant’s ‘‘discovery’’, and not far out of town was evidence that his people had been farming long before the Hentys.

The Budj Bim landscape, about 40 kilometres north-east of Portland, is Australia’s latest UNESCO World Heritage site, chosen for its evidence of fish and eel farming dating back at least 6800 years – the world’s oldest aquaculture operation.

Gunditjmara man Chris Saunders with smoking ceremony attendees at the Convincing Ground, near Portland. Photo: Tony Wright