Chris Adams

I am slowly learning more about the rapid colonisation of Victoria and its drastic impacts on the First Peoples, independence, communities, livelihoods and health, as lands were seized and sheep and cattle introduced changing forever the ecology especially of the grasslands and grassy woodlands and their ability to provide sustenance. The colonisation was accompanied by settler and government violence visited upon communities and individuals, followed by dislocation of survivors to missions and other reserves, from which many were relocated as numbers of survivors declined and as reserved land was expropriated for settler purposes. The few survivors gathered their people, finding ways to continue their culture and connection to Country.

On-going State and local Voices, Truth-Telling and Treaty. Opportunities to work alongside First Peoples at places like Coranderrk and elsewhere including bushland and grassland preservation, recovery, revegetation and management. I learnt next to nothing during my schooling late 1950s through to late 1960s. There were occasional vague references within my family (most ancestors having arrived from England, Scotland and Ireland between the 1840s and 1860s) to the last people remaining at Coranderrk in the 1920s (maybe a grandmother was part of a group trying to provide charitable relief) and to small ‘traveller’ groups of ‘aborigines’ passing by and calling in on a family friend’s dairy farm in Traralgon. We were a largely suburban Melbourne family, with my parents purchasing a house block from subdivided former dairy and orchard land in Blackburn.

On-going State and local Voices, Truth-Telling and Treaty. Opportunities to work alongside First Peoples at places like Coranderrk and elsewhere including bushland and grassland preservation, recovery, revegetation and management. I learnt next to nothing during my schooling late 1950s through to late 1960s. There were occasional vague references within my family (most ancestors having arrived from England, Scotland and Ireland between the 1840s and 1860s) to the last people remaining at Coranderrk in the 1920s (maybe a grandmother was part of a group trying to provide charitable relief) and to small ‘traveller’ groups of ‘aborigines’ passing by and calling in on a family friend’s dairy farm in Traralgon. We were a largely suburban Melbourne family, with my parents purchasing a house block from subdivided former dairy and orchard land in Blackburn.