From the myth of Prester John to the character of Tarzan, the idea of a Western white person living among jungle natives has always been intriguing. Thus, the legend that emerged in mid-19th-century Australia isn’t surprising. It began when a Scottish shepherd emigrant wrote a letter to the press reporting the discovery of several European-origin objects whose owners had allegedly been killed by an Aboriginal tribe still holding a woman captive. The case concluded with a final twist that turned everything upside down.

The Sydney Morning Herald is a newspaper founded in 1831 and is therefore the oldest in Australian journalism (it still exists and competes with The Daily Telegraph for the title of the most-read newspaper in the country). On December 28, 1840, it published an unusual letter that caused a sensation.

The letter in question was signed by Angus McMillan, a Scottish immigrant born in 1810 in Glen Brittle (on the Isle of Skye), who left his homeland in 1838 to settle in New South Wales. There, he continued his family’s trade of sheep breeding for a fellow Scotsman, Captain Lachlan Macalister. It was Macalister who informed him that landowners in the Monaro region, where he worked, were seeking to overcome a persistent drought by expanding into nearby Gippsland (in the southeastern part of what is now Victoria) and were recruiting explorers to survey the area.

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The letter by Angus McMillan published in the relevant page of The Sydney Morning Herald. Credit: Trove

Since settlers from Monaro had already moved to Gippsland and other explorers, like Polish Count Pawel Edmund Strzelecki, had shown interest in the mission, McMillan accepted the proposal and set out in May 1839. Things didn’t go well. McMillan was accompanied by an elderly Ngarigo guide named Jimmy Gabber, who, six days in, refused to continue because they were entering Gunai territory, his ancestral rivals. When McMillan tried to force him, Gabber struck him with a club, and McMillan had to draw his revolver to calm him down. Even so, Gabber insisted on turning back, leaving McMillan to continue alone.

Heading west, McMillan reached what is now the city of Buchan, then a mere postal station, and later Omeo. But he found no suitable land for agriculture or livestock, nor were there any usable rivers or lakes. Two weeks later, he decided to return, not encountering even a trace of the feared Aboriginal people his guide had warned about. Undeterred by the failure, he embarked on a second expedition in December of that year, advancing southwest to west across the plains toward the settlement of Sale.

This time, he came across several watercourses surrounded by excellent pastures for sheep: the Nicholson, Mitchell, Macalister, and Avon Rivers. He registered these sites in his name and that of his partner, Captain Macalister, with the colonial authorities. Over the next two years, he conducted further explorations. Although he was not the first to visit those areas, his efforts were crucial for mapping them, opening routes that would later become roads, and identifying suitable points for colonization, such as what is now Port Albert.

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Angus McMillan. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Gippsland extends from the aforementioned New South Wales to the eastern part of Melbourne, nestled between the Great Dividing Range to the north and Bass Strait to the south. The first white settler there, in 1835, was Samuel Anderson, also a Scotsman. As we have seen, McMillan arrived a few years later and named the area Caledonia Australis. He was soon followed by Strzelecki, who inadvertently traveled the same route and renamed the sites. Ultimately, it was the Polish explorer’s name that stuck: Gippsland, in honor of New South Wales’ governor, who was a friend of his.

However, the European pioneers were not setting foot on uncharted wilderness. For centuries, the area had been home to two Aboriginal peoples: the Bunurong (or Boonwurrung) and the Gunai/Kurnai. The former, part of the Kulin nation (an alliance of five native peoples with a shared language and culture—the others being the Taungurong, Wathaurong, Woiwurrung, and Djadjawurrung), occupied only the southeastern frontier of Victoria, including Port Phillip Bay, the Mornington Peninsula, Western Port, and the Bass Strait coast.

The focus here, however, is on the Gunai/Kurnai, whose name encompasses both “Gunai” and “Kurnai”, referring to ethnicity and language. As a non-literate people, there are no written records of how they referred to themselves beyond phonetic approximations—challenging, as each group had its own dialect. They were composed of five clans (Brataualung, Braiakalung, Brabiralung, Tatungalung, and Krauatungalung) spread across nearly all of Gippsland and the southern Victorian Alps.

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Map of Australia’s Aboriginal regions. Gippsland is located in the southeastern corner of Victoria, facing Bass Strait. Credit: NordNordWest / Wikimedia Commons

The Gunaikurnai engaged in periodic wars against their neighbors from the Kulin nation, but when the white settlers arrived in search of land, they encountered a new and dangerous enemy. In reality, the temperate and humid climate of Gippsland does not make it a fertile region, nor does it have significant mineral deposits, except for lignite and, offshore, oil and natural gas (there would later be a brief gold rush). However, in the first half of the 19th century, these resources were not yet appreciated, and it was ranchers who led the colonization. Since they needed vast spaces for their enormous sheep flocks, conflict with the Indigenous people was inevitable.

Clashes had already begun before McMillan’s arrival, although they were of little consequence as they involved only a few settlers. However, in the summer of 1840, the Scotsman was traveling with half a thousand head of cattle and had to repel several attacks, realizing that it would be difficult to attract the attention of landowners if not only settlers but also sheep were in danger. For this reason, the letter he sent to the newspaper can be considered suspicious at best. In it, he described a double discovery: one macabre and the other surprising.

That very afternoon, we reached a camp of twenty-five black natives, mainly women, who fled as we approached, leaving everything behind except some of their spears. We then searched their camp, where we found European items…

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Tribes of southwestern Australia, in the state of Victoria. Credit: Tirin aka Takver / Wikimedia Commons

The text lists various objects (muskets with ammunition, a sewing kit, wallets, miscellaneous tools, towels with embroidered initials, blankets, coins, bottles, a press, a teapot, notebooks, a Bible, medical forms…) and above all, a lot of clothing, some of it stained with blood. This last detail was ominous, and the next discovery confirmed it:

Enclosed in three kangaroo-skin bags, we found the corpse of a child about two years old, which Dr. Arbuckle examined carefully and professionally, determining beyond a doubt that the child was of European parentage; parts of the skin were perfectly white and not discolored in the slightest.

What they saw next was even more surprising and would be what captured public attention upon their return:

We observed the men wielding spears and driving the women ahead of them. One woman, in particular, we noticed, kept looking back at us—a circumstance that didn’t strike us much at the time—but on examining the marks and figures around the largest hut, we were immediately struck by the belief that this unfortunate woman is a European, a captive of these merciless savages.

The language used already reveals the position taken, but, in case it wasn’t clear enough, McMillan expressed his conclusions bluntly:

Since the blacks confronted us in great numbers the next day, and as our party consisted of only four, we reluctantly deemed it necessary to return to the station without achieving our objective. This was all the more painful for our feelings, as we have no doubt that the Aborigines have perpetrated a terrible massacre of Europeans—men, women, and children.

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Distribution of Gunaikurnai clans across Gippsland. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

But who were the victims? No one seemed to know, and in the face of ignorance, rumors quickly arose, especially after the Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser republished the letter on January 18, 1841, and the Tasmanian Weekly Dispatch did so four days later, reaching numerous readers and causing a sensation in public opinion. The main hypotheses pointed to two women traveling aboard the ship Britannia, wrecked on Ninety Mile Beach: the captain’s wife and an emigrant traveling to Sydney to join her fiancé, a certain Frazier. However, this was impossible, as McMillan’s alleged sighting had occurred before the shipwreck.

Perhaps for this reason, other possibilities emerged; one of the most sensational spoke of a woman who fled with her daughter from an abusive husband and found refuge among the Gunaikurnai. Of course, this didn’t explain why the child ended up dead, but over time, the legend grew like a rolling snowball, embellished with almost literary details, such as a heart carved into the trunk of a tree near the Flooding Creek farm (founded in 1844 by another Scotsman, Archibald McIntosh, and the origin of the present-day city of Sale), which eventually gave that spot its name: Heart Station.

The mystery of the captive white woman spurred authorities to organize expeditions to find her. Some posted signs in English and Gaelic—just in case she was Scottish, like most of the settlers in that area—warning her that they were searching the region to rescue her and offering some recommendations:

WHITE WOMAN! – Fourteen armed men, partly white and partly black, are looking for you. Be cautious and run to them when you see them near. Pay special attention at dawn, as that is when the group expects to rescue you. The white settlement lies toward the setting sun.

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Photograph from 1847 of Koori Aboriginals, the ethnic group that inhabited Victoria and New South Wales. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

As expected, the lack of results from such an outlandish initiative led to an even more lamentable action: launching a campaign against the Guanaikurnai to rescue their enigmatic prisoner. This was probably McMillan’s objective from the beginning: to provoke a casus belli that would allow the settlers to expel the Aboriginal people and seize their lands. With the same excuse of liberating kidnapped children, similar campaigns were carried out in the United States against the Apaches in the last quarter of the century.

The accusation against McMillan is not unfounded, as he personally led several of these raids. In fact, he had already directed two in 1840, those at Nuntin and Boney Point, followed by two more the next year in Maffra and Butchers Creek (now Boxes Creek, near the town of Metung), and another pair in 1842, targeting Skull Creek and Bruthen Creek. The exact number of casualties is uncertain, but estimates suggest hundreds in total. The worst massacre occurred in 1843 at Warrigal Creek, as revenge for the killing of Ronald Macalister by two natives at Port Albert, allegedly while he was conversing peacefully with them.

McMillan assembled a group of twenty men he called the Highland Brigade because they were all of Scottish descent, and they attacked the Brataualung village (one of the Guanaikurnai tribes, let us recall), killing between sixty and one hundred and fifty people, according to witnesses. One of them, William Hoddinott, wrote a harrowing account of the massacre in 1925:

The brigade, approaching the blacks camped around the waterhole at Warrigal Creek, surrounded them and fired upon them, killing a great number. Some escaped into the bushes, others jumped into the waterhole, and as soon as they raised their heads to breathe, they were shot until the water turned red with blood. I knew two blacks who, though wounded, survived the pit. One was a boy of about twelve or fourteen at the time. A bullet struck his eye; he was captured by the whites and forced to guide the brigade from one village to another.

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Tinted lithograph depicting an Aboriginal massacre in 1852. Credit: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Days later, the Highland Brigade annihilated other Indigenous groups at Freshwater Creek, Gammon Creek, and Red Hill, leaving the area cleansed of enemies. William Thomas, appointed Protector of the Aborigines for New South Wales and Victoria by Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg, stated in 1845 that after the events, one could collect a cartload of Brataualung bones. From the beginning, the goal was, according to contemporary historians, to exterminate the natives.

In fact, the legends about white women held captive by them not only persisted but multiplied, always providing a pretext for actions against the Guanaikurnai to free up the lands they occupied. Between 1844 and 1846, punitive expeditions and killings continued. In 1847, more than fifty natives were killed in Central Gippsland after a rumor claimed they were hiding the prisoner. And even in 1850, three more raids were conducted, leaving dozens of bodies in their wake.

The Indigenous people of southeastern Australia were driven to the brink of extinction. A settler named Henry Meyrick declared in 1846:

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest has ever been hunted with such perseverance as they have. Men, women, and children are shot whenever they are found… I have protested against this in every station I have been to in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept secret because the penalty would surely be the gallows… If I caught a black killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog, but no consideration in the world would induce me to enter a camp and shoot indiscriminately, as is always the custom.

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Monument in memory of Angus McMillan in Stratford, Victoria. Credit: Vmenkov / Wikimedia Commons

In one of these actions, a Brataualung boy named Thackewarren was even captured, taught English, and used as an interpreter to persuade his people to return the prisoner. The proposal was accepted, and a day was agreed for the handover, without anyone imagining the surprise that awaited them. None other than Charles Tyers, the Commissioner of Crown Lands, traveled to the site brimming with satisfaction and organized grand festivities to welcome the unfortunate captive. Little did he know that his smile would soon freeze on his face.

Because when the moment finally arrived… the Guanaikurnai presented themselves bearing a large wooden female bust identified as the figurehead of the Britannia, a ship that had wrecked nearby years earlier. Was this image the origin of the legend, the cause of genocide? It is impossible to determine how much confusion and how much malevolence lay behind such a grotesque episode. But in the end, McMillan and the white settlers achieved their goal: the lands of Gippsland were now available for their sheep.

McMillan, in particular, founded a farm that within a decade spanned one hundred and fifty thousand acres, the second largest in the region. However, a series of fires and poor investments left him in debt, forcing him to sell most of the land. Married to Christina MacDougald, who bore him two children, he had no choice but to return to exploration to map Gippsland. He died in 1865 after being crushed by a horse, leaving his family destitute, though authorities took care of them. Later, his memory as the man who paved the way for the region was vindicated, and several monuments were dedicated to him—monuments that the approximately three thousand remaining Guanaikurnai now demand be demolished.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on November 27, 2024: La historia de la «mujer blanca» cautiva de los aborígenes australianos, y su posterior liberación

SOURCES

Augustus McMillan, Supposed outrage by the blacks

Julie Carr, ‘The Great “White Woman” Controversy’

Thomas Francis Bride (ed.), Letters from Victorian pioneers

Colin Tatz, Australia’s unthinkable genocide

Lyndall Ryan, Settler massacres on the Australian colonial frontier, 1836-1851

Cheryl Glowrey, Angus McMillan

Paul R. Bartrop, Punitive expeditions and massacres. Gippsland, Colorado and the question of genocide

Wikipedia, White woman of Gippsland

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