Shepherds of Colonial Victoria

Shepherds and the Colonial Frontier: Pastoral Expansion, Violence, and Indigenous Resistance in Early Victoria

The arrival of shepherds in early colonial Victoria marked a turning point in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Between 1835 and the 1850s, thousands of British and European men were employed to tend flocks on unceded Indigenous lands across the Port Phillip District. They became the frontline of occupation—clearing forests, fencing waterways, and driving sheep across sacred Country.

While many shepherds were convicts, ex-soldiers, or impoverished migrants, their presence transformed the landscape and catalysed violent conflict with First Peoples. On Wadawurrung Country, as in the Western District, Gippsland, and the Loddon Valley, their arrival triggered massacres, reprisals, and the establishment of the frontier justice system—where almost no one was held accountable for violence against Indigenous communities.

This article explores the social background of shepherds, their worldview, their role in Victoria’s early pastoral economy, and the devastating consequences of their presence on Indigenous societies.

The Rise of the Shepherd Frontier

From Penal Colonies to Pastoral Frontiers

In the 1830s, the Port Phillip District (later Victoria) was opened to squatting and grazing. Wool, not gold, was the first economic engine of colonisation. Settlers from Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales brought thousands of sheep across Bass Strait and over the Great Dividing Range. With few roads or towns, these flocks were tended by shepherds—men who lived alone or in pairs, guarding stock in remote bushland outposts. Their huts became the outposts of empire, marking the slow and often violent spread of colonial boundaries.

Who Were the Shepherds?

Most shepherds came from the lower classes of Britain, Ireland, and Scotland. Many were ex-convicts, ticket-of-leave men, or rural labourers seeking wages in the colonies. Others were migrant labourers brought during the 1840s depression to work for squatters.

Living in isolation, they often received poor rations—flour, tea, salt meat—and wages of only £10–15 per year (Shaw, 1966). With little contact with authority, many acted as armed agents of occupation, deciding when to shoot, threaten, or “disperse” Indigenous families who approached their stations.

Their worldview reflected both poverty and empire: they saw themselves as workers of the land but inherited the settler belief that the landscape was empty and theirs to claim.

Shepherds and the Taking of Country

Wadawurrung Land: The Frontier of the Western Plains

The Wadawurrung people—whose Country extends across Geelong, Ballarat, the Bellarine Peninsula, and the Leigh–Barwon–Moorabool river systems—were among the first to encounter shepherds after 1836.

As squatters like Foster Fyans, the Learmonth brothers, and Charles Franks established runs, they brought hundreds of sheep and hired shepherds to patrol the volcanic plains.

These shepherds fenced off waterholes and yam grounds, shot native dogs, and frequently retaliated against Wadawurrung resistance with violence.

Documented incidents include:

• 1836–1837: Shootings and reprisals near the Barwon and Moorabool Rivers, including deaths following the killing of settler livestock (Clark, 1995).

• 1836 Mt Cottrell Massacre: After a shepherd named Charles Franks was killed near Werribee, a reprisal party of settlers and soldiers attacked a Wadawurrung camp, killing at least ten people. The colonial press celebrated the action as “justice.”

• You Yangs and Barrabool Hills Conflicts (1837–1839): Shepherds armed with muskets conducted raids after sheep thefts, while Wadawurrung men responded with fire and spear attacks.

Such conflicts were rarely recorded in official reports but survive in oral histories and local accounts that describe a pattern of shepherd-led frontier warfare.

The Shepherds’ Worldview and Daily Life

The Bush Outpost

A shepherd’s hut was a crude shelter of bark and wattle, isolated miles from the nearest homestead. Each morning he released hundreds of sheep to graze and watched them from sunrise to sunset, often with only a dog for company.

The routine fostered both loneliness and paranoia. Indigenous families—crossing their own Country or hunting kangaroo—were often treated as trespassers or thieves. Violence erupted quickly, particularly when orders from squatters instructed shepherds to “protect the run at all costs.”

Cultural Misunderstanding

While some shepherds traded food or tobacco with Indigenous groups, most lacked understanding of local law and boundaries. For Indigenous communities, shepherd incursions onto sacred or resource-rich Country were acts of desecration. For the shepherds, survival meant asserting dominance.

This mutual incomprehension—combined with the imbalance of power—turned routine encounters into deadly confrontations.

Violence, Reprisals, and Impunity

Across Victoria

The violence associated with shepherds was not confined to Wadawurrung Country. Similar events occurred across the colony:

• Western District: During the 1839–1846 Eumeralla Wars, shepherds and stockmen on Gunditjmara Country fought a drawn-out guerrilla conflict with Indigenous resistance groups. Dozens of Aboriginal camps were “dispersed” (Critchett, 1990).

• Gippsland: Squatters and shepherds under Angus McMillan carried out multiple massacres, including the Warrigal Creek massacre (1843), killing scores of Gunai/Kurnai people (Fels, 1988).

• Loddon and Avoca Regions: Shepherds working for William Parker and William Serjeantson were implicated in reprisal killings of Dja Dja Wurrung families after livestock raids.

These incidents reflected an emerging pattern of frontier terror—where violence was informal but systematic, designed to clear land for grazing.

In the Courts

When Indigenous people fought back, the colonial courts swiftly enforced British law.
When settlers or shepherds committed massacres, cases were dismissed or ignored.

Notable examples include:

• R v. Kilmeister and Others (1838): The “Myall Creek Case” in NSW led to seven men being hanged for killing Wirrayaraay people. But this precedent was never followed in Victoria; no one was executed for killing an Aboriginal person.

• Mt Cottrell Inquiry (1836): Despite public knowledge of the massacre, no one was prosecuted. The settlers claimed “self-defence.”

• Western District Attacks (1840s): Investigations by the Chief Protector George Augustus Robinson often identified perpetrators, yet colonial magistrates ruled the killings “justified acts of protection” (Clark, 1998).

The legal silence reinforced the colonial message: Indigenous lives held no value in the courts of the Crown.

Shepherds and Environmental Transformation

Sheep transformed the Victorian landscape as completely as gunfire did. Overgrazing stripped native grasses and yam-daisy fields, while erosion and compaction reduced wetland fertility. For the Wadawurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, and Taungurung, this destroyed the foundations of economy, culture, and spirituality—further entrenching dependency on mission rations by the 1850s (Broome, 2005). The arrival of the shepherd thus marks not only a human frontier but an ecological one—a profound rupture in Country itself.

Indigenous Resistance and Survival

Despite violence and displacement, Indigenous communities across Victoria resisted. Wadawurrung families continued to light cultural fires, conduct ceremony in secret, and maintain connection to sites such as Wurdi Youang and Mount Buninyong. Dja Dja Wurrung and Gunditjmara groups adapted to new economies, working as shearers, guides, and trackers while maintaining kinship obligations under extreme pressure (Barwick, 1998).

The image of the shepherd as a lonely labourer in the wilderness obscures this deeper reality: he stood at the edge of an empire, enforcing the dispossession of people who never surrendered their sovereignty.

Legacy and Historical Memory

The pastoral frontier has long been romanticised in Australian culture—depicted in paintings by Frederick McCubbin and poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon as a story of courage and endurance. Yet behind those stories lay the unacknowledged violence of shepherds, stockmen, and squatters who cleared the land by force. Modern truth-telling in Victoria, through the Yoorrook Justice Commission and local Indigenous heritage programs, now seeks to re-centre these histories. By acknowledging the role of shepherds in dispossession, Victoria can better understand the origins of inequality, trauma, and resilience that continue today.

Conclusion

The history of shepherds in Victoria reveals the complex intersection of class, empire, and violence. They were poor men serving wealthy squatters, yet they became the instruments of invasion—marking the land with huts, fences, and gunfire. On Wadawurrung Country, their arrival shattered millennia of cultural balance. Across the colony, their actions triggered wars, massacres, and a new legal order that denied Indigenous humanity. Remembering the shepherds not as heroes but as participants in a violent colonial system is essential to truth-telling. Their story is one of hardship—but also of complicity—and understanding it allows both settlers’ descendants and Indigenous peoples to confront the shared, contested ground of Victoria’s history.

References

Barwick, D. (1998). Rebellion at Coranderrk. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Broome, R. (2005). Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Clark, I. D. (1995). Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria 1803–1859. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Clark, I. D. (1998). The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate. Melbourne: Heritage Matters.
Critchett, J. (1990). A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers 1834–1848. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Fels, M. (1988). Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District, 1837–1853. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Reynolds, H. (1987). The Law of the Land. Ringwood: Penguin.
Shaw, A. (1966). A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria Before Separation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Written, Researched and Directed by James Vegter (22 October 2025)

MLA

Sharing the truth of Indigenous and colonial history through film, education, land, and community.
www.magiclandsalliance.org

Copyright MLA – 2025

Magic Lands Alliance acknowledges the Traditional Owners, Custodians, and First Nations communities across Australia and internationally. We honour their enduring connection to the sky, land, waters, language, and culture. We pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, and to all First Peoples’ communities and language groups. This article draws only on publicly available information; many cultural practices remain the intellectual property of their respective communities.