Frontier History in Colonial Early Victoria
The Bell of Geelong: Sound, Settlement, and Control in Early Colonisation
In the first decades of colonisation, bells were not simply tools of communication — they were instruments of power, order, and cultural domination. In Geelong (Djilang), during the 1830s and 1840s, the ringing of bells marked more than the passage of time. They announced the rhythms of European settlement — calling workers, summoning churchgoers, warning of fires, and enforcing law.
To settlers, the bell symbolised civilisation, discipline, and permanence. To the Wadawurrung people, whose lives followed ancient cycles of ceremony, season, and song, the bell’s metallic resonance was a foreign intrusion — a sound that fractured the harmony of Country and signalled dispossession.
Colonial Sound and Social Order
Transplanting European Rhythms
Across Britain and Europe, bells had long structured daily life, calling people to labour, worship, and authority. Settlers brought this soundscape with them to the new colony. A bell, once installed, transformed a tent camp into a “town”, marking both territorial claim and spiritual dominance (Cannon 1991).
In early Geelong, church and school bells became the metronome of community routine. The first bells at St Peter’s and St Mary’s churches called settlers to worship, while the town bell sounded for emergencies, civic gatherings, and law enforcement.
By the 1840s, the soundscape of Djilang — once filled with the soft harmonies of wind through grasslands, bird calls, and Wadawurrung ceremony — was overlaid by the insistent tolling of colonial metal.
The Gaol Bell and the Sound of Law
The Geelong Gaol, constructed between 1849 and 1864, introduced one of the colony’s most enduring and oppressive sounds: the gaol bell. It rang for prisoner movements, punishments, and public hangings. Its resonance travelled across town, assuring settlers that the “rule of law” prevailed — a comfort to the colonists, but a reminder to Indigenous people of a justice system that criminalised their very existence.
To the Wadawurrung, the bell was a sonic symbol of occupation and surveillance, echoing across Country that had once been governed by Wadawurrung law (Ngadak biik) — based on kinship, balance, and reciprocity, not imprisonment or execution (Clark & Heydon 2002; Reynolds 1987).
Church Bells and Cultural Control
By the mid-19th century, Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Wesleyan congregations had established multiple churches in Geelong. Each erected bell towers whose chimes imposed Christian order on Wadawurrung Country.
At nearby Buntingdale Mission (1839–1848) — established by Wesleyan missionaries on the Barwon River — the mission bell replaced ceremony and song. Aboriginal people were required to respond to the bell’s call to work, prayer, or meals, abandoning traditional ceremonies. The bell thus became both an acoustic boundary and an instrument of assimilation — a constant reminder that Indigenous time, law, and spirituality were being overwritten by imported ritual (Broome 2005; Critchett 1990).
Bell Post Hill: Sound as Surveillance
To the north of Geelong, the area now known as Bell Post Hill gained its name from a post fitted with a bell used for early-warning signals among settlers. Historical accounts describe how the bell was rung to alert farmers when Aboriginal people were seen nearby. It functioned as a frontier alarm — a sound that mobilised settlers and reinforced exclusion.
By the late 1830s, Wadawurrung people were forbidden from entering central Geelong. The bell became an auditory barrier, declaring through sound that Djilang was now settler territory.
For Wadawurrung families, the bell’s toll was both a warning and a wound — a message that their presence on their own Country had become illegal (Critchett 1990; Clark & Heydon 2002).
The Physics of Bell Sound and Colonial Authority
Resonance and Frequency
Large bells produce dominant frequencies between 200–800 Hz, creating deep, long-carrying tones that can travel several kilometres (Rossing 2000). In open plains such as those surrounding Geelong, these sounds propagated easily, often reaching the river flats of the Barwon and Moorabool valleys — embedding colonial presence even in silence.
Propagation Across Country
Sound transmission depends on air temperature, wind, and topography. Across Djilang’s basalt plains, the bell’s metallic tone cut through natural ambience — overpowering the acoustics of clapsticks, voice, and ceremonial song.
Contrast with Indigenous Soundscapes
Wadawurrung sound traditions centred on rhythmic, human-scale instruments — clapsticks, skin drums, voice, and dance — sounds designed for community gatherings, not domination.
The colonial bell, engineered to resonate across great distances, symbolically and physically imposed one sound system over another, encoding authority into the physics of vibration.
Psychological Impact
Metallic resonance produces overtones that evoke alarm and urgency. To Wadawurrung ears, unaccustomed to such harmonics, the bell’s sound was alien and invasive.
Unlike birdcalls or the hum of wind, its vibration did not belong to Country — it marked the arrival of foreign law and time, transforming the natural soundscape into an auditory instrument of colonisation.
Bells as Tools of Settlement and Erasure
The colonial bell served multiple roles:
Temporal Control: Dividing the day into hours, erasing seasonal time.
Spiritual Supremacy: Replacing ancestral songs with Christian ritual.
Spatial Authority: Marking settler space and policing Indigenous mobility.
Psychological Domination: Reinforcing the hierarchy between coloniser and colonised through repetitive, commanding sound.
Across Geelong, from the gaol to the missions, the ringing bell became the sound of ownership — declaring that Country, once sustained through song and ceremony, now belonged to the Crown.
Conclusion
The bells of Geelong — from the gaol, churches, and Bell Post Hill — collectively forged a colonial soundscape of discipline, surveillance, and exclusion. Their tones carried law, faith, and fear, reverberating through a land already rich with ancient rhythms.
For settlers, the bell’s sound meant order and belonging. For the Wadawurrung, it marked dislocation — the transformation of Djilang from a place of ceremony and song to one dominated by foreign sound, faith, and law.
Remembering these sonic histories reveals how colonisation was not only written in land seizures and violence but also heard — in the tolling of bells that declared Country conquered. Today, as Geelong re-examines its past through truth-telling and treaty, the echo of those bells invites reflection on how control can be expressed not just through sight or force, but through sound itself.
References
Attwood, B 2003, Rights for Aborigines, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Broome, R 2005, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Cannon, M 1991, Old Melbourne Town: Before the Gold Rush, Loch Haven Books, Main Ridge.
Clark, ID & Heydon, T 2002, Dictionary of Aboriginal Placenames of Victoria, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Melbourne.
Critchett, J 1990, A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers, 1834–1848, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.
Reynolds, H 1987, The Law of the Land, Penguin, Ringwood.
Rossing, TD 2000, The Science of Sound, Addison-Wesley, San Francisco.
Victorian Government 2022, Yoorrook Justice Commission Interim Report, Melbourne.
Written, Researched and Directed by James Vegter 16/09/2025
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