This popular local history explores the origins of white settlement in South Gisborne and surrounds, a farming district known in Gold Rush days as Cabbage Tree and later Couangalt, whose story involves Melbourne’s elite as well as the small voices of Victoria’s colonial history.
Thorough and scholarly research on early families and their lives is backed up with hundreds of historic pictures.
With physical signs of the area’s First Nations history sadly long obliterated, the book takes its start from the squatters of the 1830s – John Aitken and WJT Clarke – and the immigrants who arrived with the Gold Rush in the 1850s, all of whom have left signs of existence that today’s occupants can trace. It includes some recorded descriptions of Aitken’s contacts with local First Nations people whose numbers, distressingly, were decimated after the European arrival.
Haystacks & Hellfire draws on old newspapers, documentary sources, written recollections and dozens of personal interviews to take readers on a journey through the district’s family lives from the European influx up to the beginnings of the commuter culture in the 1970s.
Second edition available.