Indigenous Children during Colonial Survival

Children of the Frontier: Survival, Adaptation, and Education in Early Colonial Victoria (1835–1900)

MLA Educational Series — Indigenous History, Family, and Cultural Survival

From the 1830s through the late nineteenth century, Indigenous children across Victoria lived at the sharpest edge of colonisation. They were both the most vulnerable and the most enduring—witnesses to loss, displacement, and adaptation. As their families faced frontier violence, mission control, and legal discrimination, children became the bearers of culture, language, and survival.

This article examines the experiences of Indigenous children on the frontier of Victoria — from the Wadawurrung, Woi Wurrung, Taungurung, and Gunditjmara nations to those confined to missions and reserves. It explores how colonisation transformed Indigenous childhood, the impacts of the Protection Acts, and the ways children sustained continuity through memory, kinship, and education.

Childhood Before Colonisation

Before British settlement, Indigenous childhood across Victoria was shaped by kinship, cultural law, and education through Country. Children belonged to extended family networks that shared responsibility for their wellbeing and teaching.

Learning occurred through observation and participation. Young people gathered food, tracked animals, practised toolmaking, and learned ceremony, song, and story from elders. They were guided by the moral law of Bunjil (the wedge-tailed eagle) and Waa (the crow), the creator beings who defined social and spiritual boundaries for the Kulin Nations (Barwick 1984; Clark 1990).

This education system was relational and scientific — grounded in environmental knowledge accumulated over thousands of generations. It taught balance, responsibility, and respect for all living things.

Colonisation dismantled this foundation of cultural learning and disrupted the cycles that connected children to land and kinship.

The Disruption of Childhood: War, Disease, and Displacement

Between 1835 and 1850, the expansion of colonial settlement brought devastating upheaval to Indigenous families. The violent spread of pastoralism across the Port Phillip District led to widespread killings, disease, and dispossession — events often described as the Silent War (Clark 1995; Broome 2005).

Many children became orphans after massacres such as Mount Cottrell (1836), Convincing Ground (1833), Fighting Hills (1840), and Lubra Creek (1841). Protectorate journals record children “found wandering Country without kin” after attacks on camps (Clark 1998).

Introduced diseases such as influenza and smallpox further devastated young populations. Protector George Augustus Robinson reported that “whole families were swept away,” leaving “children to the mercy of shepherds and settlers” (Clark 1998, vol. 1, p. 273).

The combination of violence, displacement, and disease meant that within a single generation, many Indigenous children in Victoria were removed from their traditional learning environments and placed under colonial authority.

Children on Missions and Reserves

From the 1840s, surviving families were confined to missions and reserves such as Framlingham (1861), Coranderrk (1863), Ebenezer (1859), and Lake Tyers (1861). These institutions were presented as refuges but functioned as instruments of assimilation and control (Barwick 1998; Broome 2005).

Children attended mission schools that taught literacy, numeracy, and Christianity while prohibiting Indigenous languages and ceremony. Boys were trained as farm labourers or blacksmiths, girls as domestic servants. Education was designed to reshape identity and sever cultural ties.

Mission diaries from Coranderrk describe children rising early for prayer, tending gardens, and attending English lessons (Barwick 1998). Yet within this strict regime, children maintained aspects of identity — whispering in language, singing traditional songs in secret, or escaping to Country with elders to learn bushcraft (Pritchard 2012).

At Coranderrk, children like Robert Wandin and Jessie Wandin became literate activists, learning to read and write in English while retaining pride in their heritage. They later joined campaigns led by William Barak and Simon Wonga for land and recognition (Broome 2005; Barwick 1998).

The Half-Caste Acts and the Division of Families

The Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 and the Half-Caste Acts of 1886 and 1890 authorised government control over Indigenous families. These laws empowered officials to remove children of mixed descent from missions and families, placing them in white households or industrial schools.

The superintendent of Framlingham, John Goodall, recorded in his 1874 journal that “the mothers wept as the wagons came for their children… they knew they would not return” (Goodall Journal, in Pritchard 2012).

These removals created generational trauma, disrupted kinship systems, and foreshadowed the Stolen Generations of the twentieth century (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997).

Despite these policies, parents and kin resisted. They hid children in forests, sent coded messages through relatives, or travelled on foot to visit them in distant institutions (Broome 2005).

The acts that claimed to “protect” children in reality sought to erase their identities — yet resilience and familial love ensured cultural survival.

Children Who Worked the Frontier

Not all Indigenous children were confined to missions. Across colonial Victoria, many worked alongside their families on sheep stations, goldfields, and farms. Boys herded cattle, trapped rabbits, and drove teams, while girls worked as cooks or nannies in settler households (Cahir 2012).

Some children acted as cultural intermediaries, moving between Indigenous and settler worlds. Their bilingual skills made them valuable guides and messengers. For others, labour meant exploitation — long hours and no pay. Assistant Protector William Thomas reported that “native children are often employed without recompense or protection” (Thomas Papers 1841–1850, PROV).

Yet through this work, children learned new forms of knowledge — reading landscapes altered by pastoralism, understanding colonial law, and adapting traditional survival skills to changing conditions. Their labour sustained families through some of the harshest decades of dispossession.

Education and Adaptation

Formal schooling for Indigenous children began with the Protectorate schools of the 1840s, organised by William Thomas, Edward Stone Parker, and Charles Sievwright. Teaching combined basic literacy with religious instruction, reflecting British evangelical goals rather than Indigenous priorities (Clark 1998).

By the 1860s, mission schools became central to government education policy. Ironically, while these schools aimed to assimilate, they produced articulate leaders who later used their literacy to fight for rights and justice.

Thomas Dunolly (Dja Dja Wurrung), educated at Franklinford, wrote letters to the colonial press exposing the hypocrisy of protection policies, while students from Coranderrk drafted petitions demanding self-determination (Barwick 1998; Broome 2005).

Education thus became both a weapon of assimilation and a means of resistance — a paradox that shaped Indigenous activism for generations.

Memory, Play, and Cultural Continuity

Even under restrictive conditions, children sustained culture through play, creativity, and story. Oral histories from Framlingham and Coranderrk recall children carving toys, imitating dance movements, and singing in secret (Pritchard 2012).

Mission records note punishments for “speaking native tongue,” but language persisted in whispers, games, and songs to the rivers and stars. One Framlingham Elder later recalled:

“We’d sing to the river so it remembered us.” (Pritchard 2012, p. 67).

These acts of remembrance were quiet forms of resistance. The songs and gestures that children preserved became the seeds of modern language revival and cultural renewal across Victoria.

Children as Heirs to Survival

By the 1880s, colonial administrators claimed that Indigenous people were a “dying race.” Yet children’s presence proved the opposite. A new generation born on reserves and in rural towns carried ancestral memory into the future.

These children — descendants of Wadawurrung, Gunditjmara, Taungurung, and Woi Wurrung survivors — became the founders of contemporary Victorian Indigenous communities. Many of their descendants now lead organisations such as the Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Corporation, and First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria.

Through them, the continuity of Country, kinship, and knowledge endures, refuting the myth of disappearance and asserting survival as sovereignty.

Conclusion

The children of the frontier were the keepers of continuity. They lived through massacres, removals, and assimilation policies, yet carried forward language, story, and resilience.

Their experiences show that the frontier was not merely a site of destruction but also of transformation. In learning to navigate both Indigenous and colonial worlds, they became the living bridge between past and future.

Today, their descendants honour that legacy through truth-telling, education, and cultural renewal — ensuring that the voices of the children who endured colonisation continue to shape Victoria’s living history.

References

Barwick, D. (1984). Mapping the Past: An Atlas of Victorian Clans, 1835–1904. Aboriginal History, 8(2), 100–131.
Barwick, D. (1998). Rebellion at Coranderrk. Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc.
Broome, R. (2005). Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Cahir, F. (2012). Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850–1870. Canberra: ANU Press.
Clark, I. D. (1990). Aboriginal Languages and Clans: An Historical Atlas of Western and Central Victoria, 1800–1900. Clayton: Monash Publications in Geography.
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.
Goodall, J. (1874). Framlingham Mission Journal. Quoted in Pritchard, J. (2012). Untold Stories: Framlingham and Its People. Warrnambool: Jan Pritchard.
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (1997). Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
Pritchard, J. (2012). Untold Stories: Framlingham and Its People. Warrnambool: Jan Pritchard.
Thomas, W. (1841–1850). Assistant Protector Papers. Public Record Office Victoria.

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

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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.