The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen — Kulin and Colonists at Port Phillip, 1835-1851
It would be difficult to overstate the degree to which this book should be considered a monumental achievement. Stephens’ relentless interrogation of enumerate primary sources, and the forensic level of detail combined with cultural insights woven into almost every scene, renders The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen a monstrous work of academic labour.
READ REVIEW
↓
The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen — Kulin and Colonists at Port Phillip, 1835-1851
Marguerita Stephens with Fay Stewart-Muir | 2023
For anyone unfamiliar with early Victorian history, The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen — Kulin and Colonists at Port Phillip, 1835-1851, by Marguerita Stephens (with Fay Stewart-Muir), will plunge you into a near hallucinogenic vision of time and place that Aboriginal Victorians have always been aware of, but the rest of us can barely conceive as having ever existed: so effectively has this period of history been erased from the national story.
Most lay people who ponder the causes of the dispossession of Australian Aboriginal peoples from their lands are accustomed to thinking in terms of clandestine massacres and frontier wars; combined with the decline of the Aboriginal population arising from alcoholism, malnutrition and disease. Instead, The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen problematises this simple understanding by also chronicling, in intimate chronological detail, a web of cruel government policies enacted by the Superintendent of the Port Phillip District Charles La Trobe, and his frequently duplicitous Chief Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson. They directed the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate to restrict, exclude and otherwise control Melbourne’s traditional owners, until their very existence, let alone subsistence on their traditional lands, was shattered.
In fact, The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen makes plain that the dispossession of Kulin peoples from Melbourne and surrounds was a concerted effort in which all layers of the colonial government were wholly complicit, despite feigning otherwise. Stephens’ weighty volume relates this period, in which Europeans established the city of Melbourne and in which the incremental but highly effective destruction of Eastern Kulin sovereignty took place, with compelling immediacy. Having undertaken the laborious task of transcribing the journals of Assistant Protector of Aborigines William Thomas (published in 2014), it is natural that Stephens would choose to write The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen primarily through Thomas’s eyes; and yet, in this telling, the reader becomes personally acquainted not only with Thomas and his family, but with a great number of historically important Wurundjeri and Bunurong figures and their families too. These individuals (central among them being the great ngurungaeta Billibellary, who must guide his people through this sudden and uninvited upheaval of their world), are not others in Stephens’ text — they are its central characters.
The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen is equally engrossing for the clear picture it paints of Kulin resistance to European occupation: resistance to government attempts to restrict their movements and prevent them from accessing and utilising the whole of their country (particularly for the enactment of law and ceremony); and resistance to the Protectorate’s efforts to interfere with and dismantle their cultural beliefs and protocols. We are now familiar with the phrase ‘sovereignty was never ceded’, and The Years of Terror, BanbuDeen clearly illustrates this to be not merely some fanciful catch-phrase. It is worth mentioning that this is not the first book to focus on Assistant Protector William Thomas’s Protectorate. It is preceded by Marie Fels’ I succeeded once: the Aboriginal Protectorate on the Mornington Peninsula, 1839-1840 (2011), and although Stephens vastly extends Fels’ work, it is difficult to imagine this book having been written without Fels’ ground-breaking efforts.
From the historians’ perspective, The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen also has much in common with the canon of what Clifford Geertz once dubbed ‘the Melbourne school’ of ethnographic history: as a work of this genre, it compares favourably with Rhys Isaac’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982), with Inga Clendinnen’s much-lauded Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán (1987) and Dancing with Strangers (2004), and with Greg Dening’s masterpiece Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1992). Where it differs from these texts is that while Stephens makes her readers conscious of her source materials and the limitations of the archive, she is less concerned with making patent the artifice of the historians’ craft. However, what The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen has in common with several of these volumes (particularly Clendinnen’s work) is its attempt to reckon with an incredibly ugly and ultimately tragic period of cultural upheaval, not through a lens of righteous hindsight but by means of simply telling the reader (as Greg Dening would say) ‘what actually happened’.
Throughout the production of the manuscript, Stephens worked continually with elder Fay Stewart-Muir, who read drafts and acted as cultural adviser and authority. This has ensured that the content of the book has seen appropriate Kulin stewardship.
It would be difficult to overstate the degree to which this book should be considered a monumental achievement. Stephens’ relentless interrogation of enumerate primary sources, and the forensic level of detail combined with cultural insights woven into almost every scene, renders The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen a monstrous work of academic labour. Accordingly, even for someone familiar with reading Aboriginal history, this book is a genuinely challenging and slow read. The narrative is complex, and the emotional weight of the story is exhausting. Nevertheless, even if it takes you a year, I recommend you take the challenge: read it, and be forever changed.
The Years of Terror, Banbu-Deen — Kulin and Colonists at Port Phillip, 1835-1851 is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Reviewer: Jacqui Durrant, PHA (Vic & Tas)