As its 200th anniversary draws near Michael O’Donnell reflects on Hume and Hovell’s epic exploratory journey, which reached the shores of Corio Bay near present-day Lara on 17 December 1824. Michael examines changing attitudes to significant colonial endeavours, expansion and settlement, acknowledging their destructive impact on First Nations people.

This article was originally published in Investigator magazine Vol. 58, No. 4, December 2024.


Two hundred years ago, on December 16 1824, one of the great feats in Australian exploration achieved its goal: the first overland journey to the Bass Strait coastline by Hume and Hovell. For over 100 years the occasion was remembered and memorialised, with newspapers recording the community enthusiasm and pride for its achievement. This was true both in Geelong, close to its ultimate destination, and elsewhere along the 650 kilometre route that the small band of explorers trod from Yass to the shores of Corio Bay in Victoria. With this year marking the bicentenary of Hume and Hovell’s journey, why is the groundswell of popular sentiment so very hard to detect? This obvious change in sentiment demands our attention.

Candidates for this closer examination are many, including the corrosive effect that is the passage of time, the altered perceptions that have come with a more culturally diverse Australian society and the challenge that the greater acceptance of paradigms critical of colonial daring-do and the negative impacts that colonisation has inflicted on First Nations peoples.

It does seem that the passage of time has eroded the memory of the event and so devalued the significance for the general populace. Many Australians are not well-informed of when and what Hume and Hovell achieved. Without this close knowledge of the events, the people who undertook the journey, the peoples they encountered and the landscapes they charted, any valid assessment of the exploration’s significance is problematic.

Hume and Hovell’s was an epic journey when viewed in the perspective of the day. Europeans had only settled in Port Jackson thirty-six years prior. It took place just eleven years after the crossing of the Blue Mountains. Its starting place near modern-day Yass, NSW, was right on the frontier of colonial expansion and their destination lay through land no European had crossed. The exploration party were equipped with a map of the coastline marked with the bearings taken by earlier maritime explorers [1] but nothing else. Nothing else, but their knowledge of the bush, their tenacity, strength of character and, most likely, the enticing prospect of future financial reward. Ahead of the small party lay two months of navigation and hard trekking through a landscape with many challenges. Of course, then they had to complete the return journey to Yass and ultimately to Sydney, all to be undertaken under a blisteringly hot Australian summer sun.

Left: Hamilton Hume, 1835. From Westgarth’s Port Phillip Settlement.
Right: Captain William Hilton Hovell, 1866. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

Altogether the party consisted of eight men. Hamilton Hume chose Claude Bossowa, Henry Angel, and James Fitzpatrick and William Hovell’s men were Thomas Boyd, William Bollard, and Thomas Smith. They took with them some familiar basics: flour, tea, coffee, sugar, salt, soap and some pork. However, they intended to supplement this supply with the bounty of the land they were to traverse. To that end, and also as a means of protection, each man took a musket and a ready supply of ammunition. [2]

It was an unusual partnership as both leaders were very different men. Hamilton Hume was a “currency lad” born near Parramatta in 1797, while his partner William Hovell, was an ex-sea captain and eleven years his senior. Hume possessed significant practical nous, bred from his familiarity with the Australian bush, while Hovell was a skilled and resourceful navigator and then farmer in the colony. Both were confident in their own abilities and, reading between the lines, almost arrogant in their assessments of their personal strengths. The two leaders tested each other, both during the expedition and indeed afterwards, as each sought to ensure that their contribution was appropriately acknowledged. After returning to their starting point in Yass there was a virtual race between Hume and Hovell to be the first to reach Sydney and inform the authorities of their success.

Hume and Hovell largely financed their own expedition, but they were given some government assistance, which included six pack saddles, a tent and some clothing for their convict servants. The party left Yass on October 17, 1824 and they arrived on the shores of Corio Bay two months later, a journey of about 650 km. [3] They were the first Europeans to discover the Murray, Ovens and Goulburn Rivers. After encountering many difficulties descending the Great Dividing Range the group reached near present-day Broadford, where they camped, on December 12. Four days later they reached the shores of Corio Bay, achieved after also crossing the Yarra, Little and Werribee Rivers. [4]

The outline map provided by Governor Brisbane to Hume and Hovell summarised the previously recorded discoveries along Bass Strait coast. Perhaps an overreliance on it, or as a result of a mistake in their calculations, Hovell incorrectly determined that the party had reached Western Port rather than Corio Bay. When this error was identified in 1826, both Hume and Hovell were stung by their mistake. Despite reporting the location of their final destination as Western Port on numerous occasions, they both denied that this was ever the case. Of course, the historical record exposes their window dressing of the facts.

Despite this lapse, the significance of this amazing journey of exploration was not lost on the future inhabitants of the township by Corio Bay. On December 16, 1853, twenty-nine years after Hovell had camped on the banks of Kennedy’s Creek (now Hovell’s Creek), he was a guest at a public dinner held in his honour at the Imperial Hotel on Corio Terrace, Geelong. Seventy local men attended the dinner and Hovell’s exploits were widely reported and lauded in the colonial press of the day. [5] Likewise in 1924, the centenary of the exploration was marked by the erection of an obelisk in Lara and the enthusiastic attendance by the community on its unveiling on December 17. [6]

Geelong Advertiser, Wednesday 17 Dec 1924, p1.

We can use these two events as markers of the high tide of recognition of Hume and Hovell’s journey. It is easy to imagine the citizens of Geelong at a time when the discovery of gold in Ballarat had secured both their fortunes and the future of their settlement. These people could see and feel the direct link between the explorers’ journey and their success in winning in the lottery, that was emigration from Britain to the colony. Likewise in 1924, as Geelong was healing from the horrors of the Great War, there was prosperity in the air and the community had confidence in their future. Two years earlier the Geelong Advertiser had spruiked this nascent optimism, “Building in and around Geelong at the present time is very brisk. A number of extensive buildings are in course of construction, while preparations are being made for a number of others at an early date.” [7] Within the year, Ford would also set up their first automotive factory here and the city became the pivot on which the state’s industrial base would turn.

In 2024 it is much harder for the casual observer to identify the connection between the early European exploration of the continent and the success and prosperity of the city and the nation more generally. The economic and social forces that shape Geelong have changed dramatically. Gone is the industrial base that was the bedrock of the city for much of the twentieth century, and its population is more diverse, the beneficiary of decades of migration from around the world.

All this does make it more difficult to assess the significance of the Hume and Hovell Bicentenary. Is the occasion something worthwhile to celebrate? From an Indigenous perspective, the celebration of Hume and Hovell’s 1824 expedition raises obvious concerns; it highlights an event that is an important marker in the history of the dispossession and disruption of First Nations peoples’ land, culture, and way of life.

For the Wadawurrung, Hume and Hovell’s journey was not an exploration of uncharted territory—it was a significant colonial endeavour that foreshadowed the European violence, expansion and settlement that was soon to be visited upon their ancestors. As such, the commemoration of this anniversary cannot be viewed without acknowledging its broader historical context: the systematic displacement, disenfranchisement, and destruction of Indigenous societies who had occupied the land for thousands of years.

Reliable estimates from that time number the size of the Indigenous population of the Port Phillip District at first contact as no less than 3,000 people, though there is debate about this. To gain some concept of the impact that European colonisation had in the district, it is instructive to study the census of the Wadawurrung people conducted by the Police Magistrate, Foster Fyans. He wrote in 1853 that of 275 Wadawurrung men, women and children he counted in 1837, less than 20 were still alive. Fyans surmised the reason for this state of affairs as largely attributable to the introduction of venereal disease by the settlers. While he describes the endemic violence and murder that occurred wherever the squatters settled, he does not see this as a causal factor. [8] Today a more critical observer would not come to the same conclusions.

At the same time as the Wadawurrung population was in freefall, the emigrant population rose quickly, and it was the discovery of gold in 1851 that accounted for its greatest increase. In 1845, the population of Geelong, including its environs, reached 3,810, six years later a census set the population at 8,291 and the town’s population peaked in 1858 at 25,000 people [9] and remained at a similar level for most of that century. While the emigrant and native-born population surged, the tenuous situation that the Wadawurrung found themselves in can be ascertained by the knowledge that today’s population, of about 700, are all descendants of just one Wadawurrung man, John Robinson. [10]

There is one more remarkable feature about the Hume and Hovell expedition, and it is that four of the eight participants recorded their experiences: Hume, Hovell, Fitzpatrick and Boyd. From them we know something of their encounter with the Wadawurrung. We learn that, after an initial difficult encounter, it was peaceful. We learn some of the first Wadawurrung words and names for the local area. In Hovell’s journal he identifies the bay as “Geelong”, the You Yangs as “Wibamanharter”, water as “Golamoo”, a water bird as “Bonering”, dog as “Narranuki” and bread as “Mumbungea”. [11] We also learn from the record that they were not the first Europeans that the Wadawurrung had seen and that even on the day they left Corio Bay it was very likely that an unrecorded vessel was there and even fired its canon to attract attention.

The scale of the impact that colonisation had on the Wadawurrung and other First Nations people can lead to binary thinking and the adoption of simple constructs that gloss over the complexities that over two hundred years of co-existence brings. Peter Sutton, the Australian social anthropologist and linguist, warns that this type of simplistic thinking can easily place a wedge between people rather than bring reconciliation and harmony. [12]

For Australians, whether Indigenous, Australian-born or immigrant, this 200 year anniversary is significant. It is an appropriate time to consider the legacy that has been left to us all. The past is not something that can be undone. We should look to it to identify and acknowledge how the people, our shared ancestors, struggled to make sense of their world. We should not judge our ancestors too harshly nor erase the evidence that shocks or is objectionable to our values and principles today. It is everyone’s responsibility to know the past and to use that knowledge to live better lives and to create a positive legacy for all who are to come.

References

[1] Hume and Hovell, https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/hume-and-hovell, accessed 15 Nov 2024.
[2] Hume and Hovell, https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/hume-and-hovell, accessed 15 Nov 2024.
[3] William Hovell’s journal, https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/discover_collections/history_nation/exploration/hume/journal.html, accessed 15 Nov 2024.
[4] Selections from Remarks on a journey from Lake George, Lat. 35 deg. 5 min., Long. – , towards Western Port, 2 October-21 December 1824, by William Hilton Hovell, https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/discover_collections/history_nation/exploration/hume/journal.html, accessed 15 Nov 2024.
[5] Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, Monday, December 19th, 1853.
[6] Geelong Advertiser, Wednesday 13 August, 1924, p1.
[7] Geelong Advertiser, 12 August 1922, p.10.
[8] Thomas Francis Bride (Ed), ‘Letters from Victorian Pioneers – being a series of papers on the early occupation of the colony, the aborigines etc’, Trustees of the Public Library, Melbourne, 1898.
[9] Samuel Mossman and Thomas Banister, ‘Australia Visited and Revisited, A Narrative of Recent Travels and Old Experiences in Victoria and New South Wales’, Addey and Co., London, 1853. https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600061h.html#ch-09 Accessed Nov 15 2024.
[10] History, https://www.wadawurrung.org.au/history. Accessed 15 Nov 2024.
[11] Selections from Remarks on a journey from Lake George, Lat. 35 deg. 5 min., Long. – , towards Western Port, 2 October-21 December 1824, by William Hilton Hovell. https://www2.sl.nsw.gov.au/archive/discover_collections/history_nation/exploration/hume/journal.html, accessed 15 Nov 2024.
[12] P. Sutton, ‘The Politics of Suffering – Indigenous Australia and the end of the Liberal consensus’, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2009, p. 212.

Corrections: The date of the unveiling of the obelisk was December 17, on the day the party reached close to Lara. The party had first reached the bay, near to Point Lillias, on December 16. The footnote for Peter Sutton’s book has been correctly placed within the text and a reference to it has been made more explicit.

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