‘Their Reserves Are a Mere Farce’: Aboriginal Stations in the Port Phillip Protectorate

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The Aboriginal reserves of the Port Phillip Protectorate were short-lived and unsettled, largely due to the resistance of Kulin clans to residing in one place. In the earliest years of European incursion onto their Country, they contested being shunted from their homelands, networks of ceremonial sites, and wide-ranging harvestscapes onto small, unleased backblocks of Crown land. Instead, Kulin moved between reserves using them as nodes in their sovereignty in order to maintain seasonal generating and collecting, and familial obligations, as well as to practise ceremony and law. Drawing on the records of Assistant Protector William Thomas, and focusing on the Nerre Nerre Warren Station (1841–43) and the Pound Bend Reserve (1852–61), this article describes the continual movement of Kulin through and across the earliest of reserve sites on which they were supposed to ‘settle’.