Description

FORGOTTEN COUNTRY

For the most part, our local histories have focused on the Yarra Valley’s pioneer settlers who by and large didn’t arrive on the scene until the early 1850s. This work, instead, focuses on the preceding forgotten years between 1837 and 1851 when the power in the land were the valley’s forty-odd squatters running mainly sheep under the day-to-day control of convict shepherds.

The book’s main thesis is land and the dramatic changes forced upon it in those first critical years by the cessation of Aboriginal fire-stick farming, general mismanagement, intensive grazing, drought years and finally the impact of disastrous Black Thursday bush fire of 6 February 1851