The Port Phillip Association

The Port Phillip Association and the Land Grab in Early Victoria

In 1835, a small group of Tasmanian settlers and investors calling themselves the Port Phillip Association (PPA) attempted to seize vast tracts of land around Port Phillip Bay — present-day Melbourne and Geelong — for sheep grazing and private profit. Led by John Batman, the group claimed to have made a treaty with the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, exchanging goods for more than 600,000 acres of land. The so-called “Batman Treaty” has long been portrayed as the only attempt at negotiation between settlers and First Peoples in Victoria. Yet it was founded on profound cultural misunderstanding and economic opportunism.

Although the British government declared the treaty invalid within months, the actions of the Association accelerated the land grab that defined early colonial Victoria. This event marks the beginning of the systematic dispossession of First Peoples and the emergence of the Port Phillip District as a settler colony.

Origins and Formation of the Port Phillip Association

The PPA formed in Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1835, during a time when pastoral expansion had overstocked Tasmanian grasslands. Members — including John Batman, John Helder Wedge, Charles Swanston, Joseph Gellibrand, and other investors — sought new grazing frontiers across Bass Strait (Cannon, 1991). Their goals were clear: secure fertile land for Merino sheep, control trade in wool and livestock, and speculate on future property values. The group combined exploration rhetoric with commercial ambition, cloaking its motives in the language of “civilisation” and “agreement.” Tasmania’s experience — where frontier violence and Aboriginal dispossession were already widespread — directly informed the group’s approach to Victoria (Ryan, 2012). The Association’s venture was thus not merely an exploratory mission but an extension of settler capitalism and extractive colonisation.

John Batman’s Voyage and the So-Called “Treaty”

The Journey

In May 1835, Batman sailed aboard the Rebecca across Bass Strait, landing near Indented Head and the mouth of the Yarra River. His expedition was equipped with sheep, rations, and written deeds prepared in English legal form.

The “Deed of Purchase”

Batman met a group of Wurundjeri elders along Merri Creek (today in northern Melbourne). He presented blankets, tomahawks, knives, mirrors, flour, and clothing, and in exchange, produced documents that he claimed transferred ownership of 600,000 acres around Port Phillip and Geelong (Reynolds, 1987).

While Batman described this event as a treaty, it was neither linguistically nor legally comprehensible to the Wurundjeri. In Kulin law, land could not be sold — it was custodially held by clans under ancestral law and kinship responsibility (Barwick, 1984; Presland, 1994). The exchange was likely understood by the Wurundjeri as one of reciprocal trade and friendship, not a permanent alienation of Country.

Batman recorded in his journal the now-famous line: “This will be the place for a village.” That “village” became Melbourne — founded on an act of deception and dispossession.

Colonial Response and the Doctrine of Terra Nullius

The British Colonial Office swiftly repudiated Batman’s actions. Governor Richard Bourke, issuing his Proclamation of August 1835, reaffirmed that all land in Australia was Crown property under the doctrine of terra nullius — the legal fiction that the continent was “unowned” (Reynolds, 1987).

The proclamation declared that:

• No private individual or group could purchase land directly from Aboriginal people.

• All such agreements were void and without legal standing.

• Settlers required Crown licences to graze stock.

Although Batman’s “treaty” was invalidated, it provided the Association and later settlers a moral veneer to justify their occupation. The government’s ruling did not return land to its rightful custodians — instead, it centralised ownership under the Crown, paving the way for sanctioned squatting (Broome, 2005).

Settlement and the Early Land Grab

Despite the legal repudiation, the Port Phillip Association pressed forward.

• In August 1835, John Pascoe Fawkner’s rival party aboard the Enterprize established the first semi-permanent settlement along the Yarra River.

• Batman’s men soon followed, bringing sheep, cattle, and supplies.

• By 1836, both parties had established rival claims, and the Port Phillip frontier began to fill with squatters.

The first colonial surveyor, Robert Hoddle, laid out Melbourne’s street grid in 1837, formalising the settler presence.

Within four years, more than 5,000 Europeans occupied the district (Broome, 2005), and by 1851, the number had surged past 77,000, while the Indigenous population across Victoria collapsed to fewer than 10,000 — decimated by disease, starvation, and violence (Critchett, 1990).

Impact on First Peoples

Dispossession of Country

The lands Batman claimed belonged to several Kulin nations — Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Wadawurrung, and Taungurung — each with their own estates, boundaries, and responsibilities to Country. Within a decade, nearly all of this land was under pastoral occupation, its grasslands converted to sheep runs.

The introduction of thousands of grazing animals destroyed murnong (yam daisy) fields, trampled sacred sites, and polluted waterways. Women’s food-gathering economies collapsed, forcing many families into dependency on settler rations or labour (Pascoe, 2014).

Violence and Frontier Conflict

Resistance was immediate. Kulin warriors defended Country by burning grass, removing stock, and attacking homesteads. Settlers retaliated with military force and punitive raids.

Notable incidents include:

• Mt Cottrell Massacre (1836), following the killing of two settlers, in which over ten Wathaurung people were shot (Clark, 1995).

• Werribee Plains and Barwon River conflicts, where early squatters used organised reprisals against Wadawurrung families.
  These confrontations reflected a broader frontier war that spread westward through the 1830s and 1840s, culminating in hundreds of killings across the Western District (Critchett, 1990; Broome, 2005).

Miscommunication and Exploitation

In Kulin culture, gift exchange and reciprocity were central to relationship-building. Batman’s goods — blankets and tomahawks — likely symbolised a friendship alliance, not a permanent surrender of land. The settlers’ interpretation of this exchange as a “sale” demonstrates the cultural and moral asymmetry of colonisation (Attwood, 2003).

The Port Phillip Association as a Colonial Enterprise

The PPA’s influence lasted only a few years, yet its legacy shaped the colony’s foundations. It was:

• The first private colonial corporation to seize land on the Australian mainland without legal authority.

• A prototype for the squattocracy — wealthy pastoralists who dominated Victorian politics and economy throughout the 19th century (Roberts, 1935).

• A catalyst for the rapid formation of Melbourne, which by 1850 had become the commercial heart of southeastern Australia.

Economically, the Association embodied settler capitalism: the conversion of Indigenous land and life into commodity — wool, tallow, and property (Broome, 2005; Cannon, 1991).

Environmental and Scientific Context

The region around Port Phillip sits atop a Pleistocene volcanic plain, with fertile basalt soils and a temperate climate ideal for pasture. Early pastoralists exploited this natural productivity but quickly degraded it. Sheep grazing stripped native grasses, caused erosion, and altered the hydrological balance of the Yarra and Maribyrnong systems (Garden, 1984).

Archaeological evidence around the Merri Creek and Yarra Bend shows millennia of Indigenous occupation: stone tools, fish traps, and hearths beneath the very sites where the treaty meeting took place (Presland, 1994). These findings reinforce that the so-called “unoccupied” land was in fact a densely inhabited, scientifically managed landscape — sustained through fire regimes, plant cultivation, and ecological knowledge (Gammage, 2011; Pascoe, 2014).

Population Change and Legacy

Between 1835 and 1851, the population balance in Victoria changed dramatically. In 1835, only around 200 Europeans had settled in the Port Phillip District, while the Indigenous population across Victoria was estimated at between 60,000 and 80,000. By 1839, the European population had surged to about 5,000, and by 1851—when Victoria formally separated from New South Wales—it exceeded 77,000, while the Indigenous population had collapsed to roughly 10,000 (Broome, 2005). This shift reflected not natural migration alone, but a catastrophic demographic collapse caused by introduced disease, violent retribution, and the loss of access to Country. The Port Phillip Association’s land grab set the pattern for expansion across western Victoria—occupation first, law later—where violence and dispossession created facts on the ground that the Crown subsequently legalised.

Conclusion

The Port Phillip Association’s “treaty” represents a foundational moment in Victoria’s colonial history — a transaction that combined deceit, ambition, and opportunism. It was an early form of corporate colonisation, driven by private wealth rather than government policy, yet quickly absorbed into imperial law.

For the First Peoples of the Kulin Nation, it marked the start of profound rupture: dispossession of ancestral estates, collapse of food systems, and enduring cultural trauma.

Today, Batman’s treaty is remembered less as an act of goodwill and more as a symbol of the false consent underlying colonisation. Truth-telling and treaty processes now underway in Victoria seek to confront that legacy — not to erase it, but to recognise it as the moment when Country was taken without understanding or justice.

Reference List

Attwood, B. (2003). Rights for Aborigines. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Barwick, D. (1984). Mapping the Past: An Atlas of Kulin Society and Territory. Aboriginal History, 8(1), 100–131.
Broome, R. (2005). Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Cannon, M. (1991). Old Melbourne Town: Before the Gold Rush. Main Ridge: Loch Haven Books.
Clark, I. D. (1995). Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria 1803–1859. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Critchett, J. (1990). A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers, 1834–1848. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Gammage, B. (2011). The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Garden, D. (1984). Victoria: A History. Melbourne: Nelson.
Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu: Black Seeds, Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala Books.
Presland, G. (1994). Aboriginal Melbourne: The Lost Land of the Kulin People. Melbourne: Harriland Press.
Reynolds, H. (1987). The Law of the Land. Ringwood: Penguin.
Ryan, L. (2012). Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.
Roberts, S. H. (1935). The Squatting Age in Australia 1835–1847. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

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

MLA

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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.