Angus McMillan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portrait of Angus McMillan, from the bronze plate of a monument

Angus McMillan (born August 14, 1810 , † May 18, 1865 ) was an explorer and one of the first pastoralists in Gippsland in the Australian state of Victoria . He is also considered to be the instigator of many massacres of the Aborigines in Gippsland between 1840 and 1847.

youth

Angus McMillan was born in Glenbrittle on the Isle of Skye in Scotland as the fourth son of Ewan McMillan . After a hard youth full of hardships, he emigrated to Australia in 1838. In his first position with Captain Lachlan Macalister he was able to gain experience with Australian pastoralism in Monaro in order to later run the Curawang Station , a sheep breeding station near Delegate . On one of his expeditions to Ensay , he first saw the Gippsland plains from Mount McLeod and informed Macalister that there might be both pasture land and a good place to build a harbor in the south. An almost fatal battle with an Aboriginal leader during this period probably shaped his view of the indigenous people of this area.

Discoveries

Around 1839 and 1840 wealthy New South Wales landowners took an interest in the Gippsland area and funded research into the area. Macalister knew the early settlers in the highlands of the Gippsland around Benambra and Omeo because they originally came from Monaro. He proposed McMillan as a candidate for further exploration of the Gippsland plain to the coast. The Polish explorer and scientist Paul Edmund de Strzelecki also set out to explore the Gippsland. Both expeditions moved from New South Wales through the already populated land around Benambra and Omeo further south to the coast.

McMillan carried out various expeditions, although he was often not the first European to visit the areas in question, but his discoveries were most important for the European settlement of the Gippsland. On the last of his early expeditions, he found a suitable port for the region in what is now Port Albert .

Bronze plate at the junction of Dargo Road over Iguana Creek, where McMillan died.

The route laid down by McMillan is still the most important north-south connection through the Gippsland. It follows the Great Alpine Road south through the Tambo Valley to Bruthen , then west over Bairnsdale and Sale along the Princes Highway and finally south again to Yarram and Port Albert.

For many decades the Gippsland was only accessible on this north-south axis from Benambra and Omeo to Port Albert, but in the 1860s a road was built from Melbourne to the east and this was followed a few decades later by the railroad. This development and the shipping traffic on the Gippsland Lakes aligned the traffic in the Gippsland to a simpler east-west axis and made the route via Benambra and Omeo atrophy to a side branch of the main route.

Next life

McMillan later occupied land in Gippsland himself to raise sheep. He was responsible for various massacres of natives who resisted the expropriation of their land and attacked European explorers and settlers. McMillan-led Kurnai massacres occurred at Nuntin , Boney Point , Butchers Creek , Maffra , Warrigal Creek and other unspecified locations in Gippsland.

In 1857 he married and had two sons, Ewan and Angus . He was a member of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria from 1859 to 1860, less than a decade after Victoria was declared an independent colony (independent of New South Wales).

Forest fires and floods destroyed McMillan's holdings, and although he was recognized as the discoverer of Gippsland, he died in May 1865 on the banks of Iguana Creek north of Glenaladale , leaving no legacy while overseeing what is now Dargo Road in eastern Gippsland.

Appreciation

The constituency of McMillan is named after him.

Web links

Commons : Angus McMillan  - collection of images, videos and audio files

literature

  • Thomas Francis Bride (Ed.): Letters from Victorian Pioneers. Melbourne, Public Library 1899.
  • Patrick Morgan: The Settling of Gippsland: A Regional History. Gippsland Municipalities Association, Leongatha 1997, ISBN 0-646-33857-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul R. Bartrop : Punitive Expeditions and Massacres: Gippsland, Colorado and the Question of Genocide In A. Dirk Moses (Ed.): Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History . Berghahn, New York 2004, ISBN 9781571814104 , pp. 200-203.
  2. ↑ Information page of the Australian government
personal data
SURNAME McMillan, Angus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Explorer
DATE OF BIRTH August 14, 1810
PLACE OF BIRTH Glenbrittle ( Isle of Skye )
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 1865
Place of death near Glenaladale (eastern Gippsland )