Lava flow

The Port Phillip District of New South Wales was more rapidly occupied by Europeans than any other region in Australia and its Western District soon claimed its place as a powerhouse of the Australian wool industry. The rapidity and success of the colonisation of Port Phillip (1834-1850) was for more than a century a cause for self-congratulation in Victoria. If its successes were legendary, so was its well-documented brutality, its landscape witness to massacres and the ruthless substitution of indigenous habitation for alien sheep and cattle runs. This `distant field of murder¿ is a vast, rich savannah, Major Thomas Mitchell¿s Australia Felix, one of the youngest volcanic regions on earth. Stretching from South Australia across the south west of Victoria, dotted with volcanic cones and crater lakes, its prominent features and their lava flows mark out the landscape in a unique way. They also suggest another way of reading its contested history. Mindful of Vincent Scully¿s arguments for the reciprocal relationship between `landscape and sanctuary¿ in ancient Greece, this paper will examine the ways in which the landscape of Australia Felix has shaped dwelling on the one hand, and how its representations have conditioned our understanding of the landscape on the other. Indigenous Gunditj Mara settlements on Mt Eccles, colonial homesteads in the Southern Grampians and homestead portraits by Eugen von Guerard and others will be used to interrogate the intricate relationships between people, place and culture