An early book on the Monaro.

Monaro was the immediate ancestral home of early Gippslanders, who retained a family memory of the pattern of life on the uplands there, and of the arduous journey over the alps and down to the Gippsland plain. They found Gippsland to be like the Monaro and so a preparation for it both were plains country interspersed with forests and surrounded on all sides by mountains.

One Monaro squatting property was of pre-eminent importance for subsequent writing on Gippsland--Maranumbla station at Buckley's Crossing (later known as Dalgety). Three related Englishmen of gentry origins settled at Maranumbla (sometimes spelt Murraumbla) in the late 1830s--David Parry-Okeden, his brother-in-law Hannibal Dutton, and his cousin Henry Haygarth. They were an educated group from the West County of England with backgrounds in the professions. One of them, Henry Haygarth, published an impressive memoir of his time there: Recollections of bush life in Australia ... (1848). In his narrative Haygarth rehearses many of the main motifs of subsequent writing on Gippsland. This book became the formative text for early writing on Gippsland, principally because of Haygarth's connection with Henry Kingsley, the first major Australian and Gippsland novelist. In the middle of his seven years' sojourn in Australia Kingsley travelled from Melbourne to Sydney and back again via the Monaro and Gippsland in 1855-6, staying with the Maranumbla group at Buckley's Crossing while on the Monaro. The three pioneering Monaro families of the 1830s depicted in Kingsley's novel The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859) are most likely based on these threee Maranumbla families.

Hamlyn's Recollections describes in detail a head-station set up by gentlemen squatters and the pattern of daily life there, as well as the rougher existence on out-stations, and at bush inns. All the features which were to become the set pieces of writing on Gippsland are included in Haygarth's account: bush musters, hunting cattle in gullies, long horse rides in the forests, bushrangers hunted by mounted police, ex-convicts as station hands, bush shepherds living solitary- lives on outstations, the depredations of Aborigines, the excitement and dangers of exploring new country, the constant sense of isolation. The book is a kind of manual or guide for those intending to set up a run in a wild, remote area; having experienced the economic downturn of the 1840s Haygarth warns the intending squatter of the boom-and-bust cycle on the Australian rural economy. It's a land of both opportunities and pitfalls.

The station in Haygarth's account is situated on a grassy plain surrounded by immense forests and mountains stretching away into the distance. The bush is immense, beautiful, picturesque, but unusual, stage and mournful. For Haygarth arriving in a pristine wilderness was like a once-only experience of witnessing the morning of the world:

'Plains and "open forest", untrodden by the foot of the white man, and, as far as the eye can reach, covered with grass so luxuriant that it brushes the horseman in his saddle; flocks of kangaroos quietly grazing, as yet untaught to fear the enemy that is invading their territory; the emu, playfully crossing and recrossing his route; the quail rising at every step; lagoons literally swarming with wildfowl ... Then mark the change that follows hard upon discovery. Intelligence of the new country reaches the settled districts, and countless flocks and herds are poured into the land of promise. It is divided into stations, and "improvements" are everywhere erected upon it; disputes arise, and a commissioner is appointed to settle them; bushrangers are "out", and mounted police are sent to hunt them down; the wild blacks, indignant at the cool occupation of their territory, spear the cattle, and the settlers retaliate ... But Nature, as if offended, withdraws half her beauty from the land; the pasture gradually loses it freshness; some of the rivers and lakes run low, others become wholly dry. The wild animals, the former peaceful denizens of the soil, are no more to be found, and the explorer, who has gazed on the district in its first luxuriance, has seen it as it never can be seen again.'

Haygarth recounts the current story of the lost white woman supposedly captured by Aborigines, and describes the life of a reformed convict. At Maranumbla a key incident is the day the bushranger Buchan Charley turns up with companions and holds the station hostage, taking horse and guns. Otherwise he acts in a non-violent manner, while telling his life-story to his captive audience in a pathetic manner in an attempt to attract sympathy. This scene becomes a set piece in subsequent writing on bushrangers. Buchan Charley is pursued and eventually captured by the Mounted Police. Bushrangers are said to be active in the Omeo area.

Haygarth describes the long and difficult journey with drays over the alps, and his relief at reaching Omeo, where he flames the scene as a painter would:

'The gloomy forest had opened, and about two miles before, or rather, beneath us--for the ground, thinly dotted with trees, sloped gently downwards--lay a plain about seven miles in breadth. Its centre was occupied by a lagoon, in some parts thickly covered with sedge, in other showing a clear expanse of water. On either side of this the plain, for some distance, was as level as a bowling-green, until it was met by the forest, which shelved picturesquely down towards it, gradually decreasing in its vast masses until they ended in a single tree. In the vicinity of the forest the ground was varied by gentle undulations, which, as they intersected each other, formed innumerable grassy creeks and open flats, occasionally adorned with native honeysuckles and acacias, and affording numberless retreats for the stately herds which occupied the plain. Two remarkable conical hills, perfectly free from timber, rose in the middle of the largest plain, dividing it about half way, and a clear and winding stream skirted it on our right. The whole, as far as the eye could reach, was clothed with a thick coat of grass, rich and luxuriant, as if the drought, so destructive elsewhere, had never reached this favoured spot.'

Gippslanders believed they had been singly blessed by Providence in finding the pastures of Omeo and the central plain hidden away from the rest of the world, Impressive passages like these set the pattern for Gippsland literature, of which Haygarth's narrative is the formative document.

Patrick Morgan, a Gippslander, is writing a book on the literature of The Gippslaand Region of Victoria.