John Batman

John Batman
Bust (likeness) of John Batman from 1882 engraving
Born	21 January 1801 Rosehill, New South Wales
Died	6 May 1839(1839-05-06) (aged 37) Melbourne
Nationality	Australia
Occupation	Grazier, Explorer, Pioneer
Spouse	Elizabeth Callaghan
Parents	William Batman, Mary

John Batman (21 January 1801 – 6 May 1839) was an Australian grazier, businessman and explorer who is best known for his role in the founding of a settlement which became Melbourne and the colony of Victoria.

Life

His parents, William and Mary Batman, came to Sydney in 1797 aboard the Ganges. John was born in 1801 at Rosehill, Parramatta (now a suburb of Sydney).

Move to Tasmania

In 1821 John (aged 20 years) and brother Henry journeyed to Van Diemen's Land (now known as Tasmania) to settle on land in the north-east near Ben Lomond. He acquired 'Kingston', a property said to be "...large in acreage and poor agriculturally,...".

In December 1825, or early 1826, Batman captured the notorious bushranger called Matthew Brady, resulting in an additional grant of land by the government.

Batman became a grazier. He participated in the capture of Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829. He employed mainland Aborigines hired in Sydney, New South Wales, for 'roving parties' hunting Tasmanians. Between 1828 and 1830, Tasmanians in this region were shot or rounded up by bounty hunters like John Batman.

As Tasmanian Colonial Governor, George Arthur, observed, John Batman "...had much slaughter to account for.". For example, in September 1829, John Batman (aged 28), with the assistance of several "Sydney blacks" he brought to Tasmania, led an attack on an Aboriginal family group together numbering 60–70 men, women and children in the Ben Lomond district of north-east Tasmania. Waiting until 11pm that night before attacking, he "...ordered the men to fire upon them..." as their 40-odd dogs raised the alarm and the Aborigines ran away into thick scrub, killing an estimated 15 people. The next morning, he left the place for his farm, with two badly wounded Tasmanian men, a woman and her two-year old boy, all of whom he captured. However, he "...found it impossible that the two former [the men] could walk, and after trying them by every means in my power, for some time, found I could not get them on I was obliged to shoot them." The captured woman, named Luggenemenener, was later sent to Campbell Town gaol and separated from her two-year old son, Rolepana, "...whom she had faced death to protect." Batman reported afterwards to British Colonial Secretary, John Burnett, in a letter of 7 September 1829, that he kept the child because he wanted "...to rear it...". Luggenemenener died on 21 March 1837 as an inmate at the Flinders Island settlement.

Later, Rolepana (aged 8 years), child-survivor of a massacre by a 'roving party' led by John Batman, travelled with him as part of the founding party of Melbourne in 1835. After Batman's death in 1839, Rolepana would have been 12 years old. Boyce notes that Rolepana was employed by colonist George Ware at 12 Pounds a year with Board on Batman's death, "...but what became of him after this is also unknown." However, Haebich records Rolepana as having died in Melbourne in 1842 (he would have been about 15 years). She also says that:

Batman openly defied Governor Arthur and [George Augustus] Robinson] by refusing to hand over two Aboriginal boys in his employ: Rolepana (or Benny Ben Lomond) and Lurnerminer (John or Jack Allen), captured by Batman in 1828. He claimed the boys were there with the consent of their parents,....He also demonstrated a strong proprietorial interest in the boys, when he told Robinson they were 'as much his property as his farm and that he had as much right to keep them as the government'. Indeed Batman was convinced that the best plan was to leave the children with the colonists, who clothed and fed them at no expense to the government and raised them to become 'useful members of society'. In a series of letters to Governor Arthur, he 'pleaded hard for the retention of youths educated by settlers and devoted to their service'.

Batman rose to prominence during the time of the Black War of 1830, during which (aged 29) he participated in the genocidal 'final solution' of forming a line across the island to drive Tasmanian Aborigines from their lands into a 'manageable' area.

In February 1830, Batman wrote to the British Colonial Secretary, John Burnett, about his difficulty in 'coming up' with [ie, capturing] the Tasmanian Aborigines. In the same letter, he asked in explaining his difficulty in capturing Tasmanians in the bush, "...if he could follow known [Aboriginal] offenders once they had made it 'to their own ground'.

The 19th century artist, John Glover, captioned one of his Tasmanian paintings Batman's Lookout, Benn Lomond (1835) "...on account of Mr Batman frequenting this spot to entrap the Natives."

Batman was diagnosed with syphilis in 1833.

By 1835, Batman's property, "...Kingston [near Ben Lomond (Tasmania)], covered more than 7,000 acres (2,800 ha), had appropriate animals and buildings, and numerous hands; but it was too rugged to be highly productive."

Foundation of Melbourne and Batman's Treaty

1880s Artist impression of Batman's Treaty being signed

Further information: Foundation of Melbourne,, and Batman's Treaty

Batman sought land grants in the Western Port area, but the New South Wales colonial authorities rejected this. So, in 1835, as a leading member of the Port Phillip Association he sailed for the mainland in the schooner Rebecca and explored much of Port Phillip.

When he found the current site of central Melbourne, he noted in his diary of 8 June 1835, "This will be the place for a village." and declared the land "Batmania".

Batman's Treaty negotiations with Aborigines took place in June 1835 on the banks of the Merri Creek in present-day Northcote, Victoria (in Melbourne), "...using legal advice from the former Van Dieman's Land attorney-general, Joseph Gellibrand, and with the support of his Aboriginal companions from New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land."

However, Batman did not visit the colonial camp that was later set up on the Yarra River (ie, Melbourne) until November 1835.

Batman negotiated a treaty (now known as Batman's Treaty but also known as the Dutigulla Treaty, Dutigulla Deed, Melbourne Treaty or Melbourne Deed), with some local Aborigines to rent their land on an annual basis for 40 blankets, 30 axes, 100 knives, 50 scissors, 30 mirrors, 200 handkerchiefs, 100 pounds of flour and 6 shirts. It is unlikely that the Wurundjeri people would have understood this transfer of land or agreed to it if they had, but, as Percival Serle wrote, "No doubt the blankets, knives, tomahawks, etc., that he gave them were very welcome". In any case, Governor Bourke deemed such a treaty invalid as the land was claimed by the Crown rather than the Aborigines and other colonists including the rival party of John Pascoe Fawkner arrived to settle Melbourne.

Land speculator & the colonization of Port Phillip District

With pastoral land in the colony of Van Diemen's Land fully allocated to colonists, and Batman himself already a significant land-owner, he turned his attention to mainland land speculation at Port Phillip Bay, which began in 1835 without the consent of the British Crown and at an enormous cost in the lives and livelihoods of its Aboriginal land-owners. With no legal recognition or protection of the Aboriginal land-owners, violence ensued. For example, in August 1836, Aborigines killed the squatter Charles Franks and an unnamed shepherd, at Franks' station on the Werribee River (near Melbourne). In response, Henry Batman (John Batman's brother) led an indiscriminate punitive expedition against 70–80 Aborigines (men, women & children) living in 9 large huts on the Werribee River, killing an unrecorded number. In spite of this, in May 1837, Henry Batman "...was appointed acting Commissioner of Crown Lands, the official charged with overseeing the squatters." Earlier, on 4 March 1837, Governor Bourke in his visit to Melbourne addressed 120 Aborigines, "...whom he exhorted...to good conduct and attention to the Missionary.' The Kulin were given blankets and four favoured men, who had been recommended for 'honorary distinctions' by [Police Magistrate Captain William] Lonsdale, were awarded brass plates."

Aftermath

By 1839, large numbers of homeless, dispossessed Aborigines, refugees from surrounding pastoral districts, were "....surviving whenever and however they could on the geographic, social and economic margins of the town [ie, Melbourne]." When George Augustus Robinson arrived in the town in the winter of 1839, "four to five hundred blacks of the Port Phillip tribes" were gathering at a camp site on the south bank of the Yarra River, suffering hunger and disease. By 1840, Robinson still "....had no stores allocated to him..." by Captain William Lonsdale, the Police Magistrate in Melbourne, even though "...it was patently obvious that the Aborigines were starving, and many were ill and near death,..." With land in the hinterland overrun by "...vast numbers of sheep and cattle.." and "...conditions in the countryside becoming intolerable, the blacks swarmed into Melbourne looking for food and blankets."

Clendinnendescribes the picture painted in 1841 by George Augustus Robinson on the grasslands of the Western District to the west of Melbourne (two years after John Batman's death), during a field trip from Melbourne to Portland via the Grampians:

What he sees troubles him deeply. In the rush to grab the land – to grab it from white competitors even more urgently than from its Aboriginal owners – blacks are being thrust off their tribal lands and left to starve. If they show the least resistance, if they spear a single sheep, whole mobs are likely to be murdered. The Law is elsewhere, in distant Melbourne. It offers no protection. Travelling through a specially tense region, Robinson makes only one journal entry for the day, but it is enough: 'All the shepherds I saw today have double-barrelled guns. The natives say, "By and by no good".

He [George Augustus Robinson] follows a trail of black complaints to the farm of a man called Francis. Francis blandly admits to having shot five blacks down by the river-they attacked him, he says, so he shot them, and later he shot another black he saw running from his sheepfold close by the homestead. Robinson finds the man's skull still lying where the body had fallen. He discovers that Francis has forbidden his black workers to touch the corpse. They have had to watch as it withered, as dogs worried at it and dragged most of it away, until only the skull is left. We can only imagine the terror – terror both of Francis, the alien psychopath with the gun, and of the unquiet spirit of the murdered man, unappeased by any ritual.

Robinson picks up the skull, puts it in his horse-drawn van, goes on his way. Closer to Melbourne he comes across an old [Aboriginal] woman wandering with what remains of her kin – a young man, a child – over land no longer hers, and sufficiently desperate to waylay this white man who speaks some of her language and who treats her gently. She dances a shuffling dance for him. It is the history of her country she is telling him through her dance. She sings its place names, and weeps for its loss.

In some regions the murderous phase is almost over, and there is a terrified peace. In one such place Robinson comes across an Aboriginal family: a man, his wife, a baby, two very young girls, He discovers they are from a group called Wol-lore-rer, or what is left of it; the tribe they say, is 'plenty all gone', 'plenty shoot him white man'. Robinson suspects that the family have been allowed to survive only because the girls are being used sexually by local whites, a suspicion which is confirmed when he overhears the girls saying over their few words of English: 'Well done fuckmoll, go it fuckmoll, good night fuckmoll'

Between 1836 and 1842, Victorian Aboriginal groups were largely dispossessed of territory bigger than England. By January 1844, there were said to be 675 Aborigines resident in squalid camps in Melbourne. Although the British Colonial Office appointed 5 "Aboriginal Protectors" for the entire Aboriginal population of Victoria, arriving in Melbourne in 1839, they worked "...within a land policy that nullified their work, and there was no political will to change this." "It was government policy to encourage squatters to take possession of whatever [Aboriginal] land they chose,....that largely explains why almost all the original inhabitants of Port Phillip's vast grasslands were dead so soon after 1835". By 1845, fewer than 240 wealthy Europeans held all the pastoral licences then issued in Victoria and became the patriarchs "...that were to wield so much political and economic power in Victoria for generations to come."

Later life

Batman and his family settled at what became known as Batman's Hill at the western end of Collins Street. He built a house at the base of the hill in April 1836. Batman's health quickly declined after 1835 as syphilis had disfigured and crippled him, and he became estranged from his wife, convict Elizabeth Callaghan. They had had seven daughters and a son. His son drowned in the Yarra River.

In his last months of his life Batman was cared for by the local Aborigines^{[citation needed]}. On Batman's death on 6 May 1839, his widow and family moved from the house at Batman's Hill and the house was requisitioned by the government for administrative offices.

Legacy

Statue of John Batman at former National Mutual Plaza off Collins Street in Melbourne unveiled 26 January 1979

The historical monument marking where Batman landed at Indented Head in 1835.

Batman was buried in the Old Melbourne Cemetery but was exhumed and re-buried in the Fawkner Cemetery, a cemetery named after his fellow colonist John Pascoe Fawkner. A stone obelisk was constructed in 1922 which was later moved to Batman Avenue before being returned to the Queen Victoria Market site in 1992.

Australian sprinter Daniel Batman is a direct descendant of John Batman.

Places named after John Batman

• Batman Bridge (Tasmania)
• Division of Batman (Victorian electoral division)
• Batman Park (Melbourne CBD)
• Batman Park (Northcote, Victoria)
• Batman's Hill (Melbourne CBD)
• Batman railway station, Melbourne (North Coburg, Victoria)
• Batman Avenue, Melbourne
• Batman Avenue, Keilor Park
• Batman Avenue, Sunbury
• Batman Avenue, Hurstbridge
• Batman Lane, Surry Hills, New South Wales
• Batman Street, Burnside Heights
• Batman Street, Footscray
• Batman Street, Altona Meadows
• Batman Street, Aberfeldie
• Batman Street, Fitzroy North
• Batman Street, Portarlington
• Batman Street, Thornton, New South Wales
• John Batman Drive, Melton West
• John Batman Gardens, Sandringham

See also

• History of Melbourne

Further reading

• Bell, Agnes Paton (1965). Melbourne: John Batman's village. Melbourne: Cassell
• Billot, C.P. (1979). John Batman : the Story of John Batman and the Founding of Melbourne. Melbourne : Hyland House. ISBN 0908090188
• Billot, C.P. (1985). The life and times of John Pascoe Fawkner. Melbourne : Hyland House. ISBN 0908090773
• Campbell, Alastair H. (1987). John Batman and the aborigines. Malmsbury, Australia: Kibble Books. ISBN 0908150091
• Harcourt, Rex (2001), Southern Invasion. Northern Conquest. Story of the Founding of Melbourne, Golden Point Press, Blackburn South. ISBN 0646403362
• Prior, Wannan and Nunn (1968). A Pictorial History of Bushrangers. Melbourne: Paul Hamlyn
• Attwood, Bain (2009), Possession: Batman's Treaty and the Matter of History, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, (xviii + 416 pages)
• Boyce, James (2008), Van Dieman's Land, Black Inc, Melbourne ISBN 9781863954136
• Boyce, James (2011), 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia, Black Inc., Melbourne ISBN 9781863954754
• Reynolds, Henry (1995), Fate of a Free People: A Radical Re-examination of the Tasmanian Wars, Penguin, Melbourne ISBN 0 14 024322 4, at page 50, onwards for role in removal of Tasmanian Aborigines.
• Jan Critchett, (1990), A distant field of murder: Western district frontiers, 1834-1848, Melbourne University Press (Carlton, Vic. and Portland, Or.) ISBN 052284389
• Ian D Clark (1990) Aboriginal languages and clans: An historical atlas of western and central Victoria, 1800-1900, Dept. of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University (Melbourne), ISBN 090968541X
• Ian D Clark (1995), Scars in the landscape: A register of massacre sites in western Victoria, 1803-1859, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Canberra), ISBN 0855752815
• Ian D Clark (2003) ‘That’s my country belonging to me’ - Aboriginal land tenure and dispossession in nineteenth century Western Victoria, Ballarat Heritage Services, Ballarat.
• The Gunditjmara People with Gib Wettenhall, (2010) The People of Budj Bim: Engineers of aquaculture, builders of stone house settlements and warriors defending country, em Press, Heywood (Victoria)

External links

• John Batman at Find a Grave
• Transcript of John Batman's journal at the State Library of Victoria.
• Batmania: a fun way to explore the people and events surrounding the foundation of Melbourne, images of the Batman Land Deed and other historical documents at the National Museum of Australia.