Acknowledgement Of Country

It was 1836 when Jack Gardiner – who gives his name to the creek just south of here – squatted on the land today we call Kingswood College to graze sheep. 

In 1840, Henry Elgar purchased 5120 acres of land we now know as Mont Albert and Surrey Hills, at one pound per acre, not to settle but to profit by selling parcels in smaller lots.

By the late 1850s, a licence to occupy Crown Land across all of the Nunawading Parish was two shillings per acre, per year – the balance of the pound per acre was payable at the end of three years if the land was fenced and one tenth of it cultivated. 

Records, accounts, and archives from the time acknowledge the presence of Indigenous people at the same time as settlement takes hold.

As sheep numbers, settlers, fences, and prices go up, Indigenous people are forced out and off the land. An Indigenous reserve at Pound Bend was established in the 1840s, and Corranderrk at Healesville in 1863.

This is what we acknowledge; people who were here, with little choice but to go there. And of course, we can imagine the likely reality of that ‘choice’.