Wominjeka fellow travellers, last weekend being the Kings birthday, I decided to pay a visit to the grave of one of the crowns least respected subjects, the “last Chief of The Yarra Yarra Tribe of Aborigines” William Barak.
Healesville is one of the most scenic towns in Victoria, nestled as it is between the Yarra Ranges and the Watts River, a tributary of the Yarra. For millennia, the exclusive preserve of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people, this beautiful valley provided all the necessities of their physical and spiritual life. The 1840s saw the near total annihilation of the Port Phillip Aboriginals and their exclusion from their historic lands. The population now less than a few dozen people, it was to Coranderrk near present day Healesville in 1863, that Simon Wonga, William Barak and their Pastor, Scott John Green, led a handful of the Kulin Nation to make a final push for an Aboriginal reserve, a place where they could live their lives in a somewhat hybrid existence of the present and the past.
They farmed the land, kept cattle and grew hops, whilst all the time being free to perform ceremony and fashion weapons and boomerangs as their ancestors had done. Unfortunately, the success of the Coranderrk reserve, as a farm, a buffer between the traditional and the industrial, and as a refuge for the Victorian Aboriginals, was short lived. Greedy squatters, speculators and an inept and corrupt State Government, saw the closure of this sanctuary in 1924.
The reserve died but has since been resurrected and a smaller property is now managed by the Wandoon Aboriginal Corporation. The land remains a bastion for the reclaiming of ancient cultural knowledge, revitalising waterways and teaching Indigenous cultural burning.
So many of the present Victorian Aboriginal population have a connection to Coranderrk by family association in the last century and it remains a special place of significant spiritual presence.
Walking amongst the grave markers and Manna gums in the cemetery at the end of Barak Lane, one feels something greater than the usual sense of loss you feel in a graveyard. As a white Irish/Australian, the feeling of loss was almost overwhelming. Standing in that small sacred place with the ever-present commemorative stone to Barak, the “Last Chief of The Yarra Yarra Tribe of Aborigines and His Race”, I wondered: how much more sacred must this place be to our First People?
Till next week Triganin – see you soon.
References:
Read more about Visitor Opportunities to Coranderrk: https://www.coranderrk.com/visitor-program