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    • How did a stolen child end up in the middle of Melbourne society after the massacre?
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    How did a stolen child end up in the middle of Melbourne society after the massacre?

    Harry Posted on

    Warning: This story contains the name of a deceased Aboriginal person and violent details of a massacre.
    Once you see it, you can’t take it back.

    He is simply referred to as ‘No’. 41: Miss Blair’s Aboriginal.

    So who was he? How does Wurundjeri appear in Woi Wurrung Country and a 19th-century group portrait showing who’s who in Melbourne?

    Her name was Lani Mulgrave Blair.

    1. Lani (Blair) Mulgrave.jpg

    Lani Mulgrave Blair.

    It is front and center in Carl Kahler’s painting. Derby Day at Flemington.

    Born in Austria, Kahler came to Melbourne in 1885 and started a successful portrait practice but is best remembered for three major works depicting Melbourne’s Flemington racecourse.
    It immortalises the day – Saturday 30 October 1886 – when Trident won the Victoria Racing Club Derby.
    This is an important nineteenth-century group portrait of approximately 200 figures and featuring many prominent citizens of Melbourne, including Sir Henry Brougham Loch (Governor of Victoria) and the Duke of Manchester.

    Reprints of the painting are held in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, the National Library of Australia, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), and the original hangs in the Victoria Racing Club in Flemington.

    Picture1.png

    Aboriginal men and boys from the Mulgrave area.

    Lani’s story begins about 2800 km north, in Far North Queensland.

    He was born around 1882 in the Mulgrave River area, at the foot of the Bellenden Ker Range, about 40 km south of Cairns.

    He was from the Mallanbarra people of the Yidindji nation. (Eight clan groups make up the Yidindji nation.)

    Aboriginal Camp on the Mulgrave River. Archibald Meston Album 1905.jpg

    Aboriginal camp on the banks of the Mulgrave River. Credit: Archibald Meston Album 1905

    Mallanbarra are known as the flat rock/stony river people; Mallan means flat rock or stony and barra means people or people of the Mulgrave River. (The river is traditionally known as Bana Baddi).

    In the early 1880s, alluvial gold was discovered in the area and the Mulgrave River Goldfield was declared.

    Steamboats made regular trips along the coast and up the Mulgrave River to drop off both supplies and men seeking their fortunes.

    As the settlements spread, Yidindji clans and family groups were destroyed after a series of massacres or ‘dispersal’ from 1880 onwards.

    Aboriginal Canoeing on the Mulgrave River_john oxley Library.jpg

    Canoeing on the Mulgrave River. Credit: John Oxley Library

    Lani was the sole survivor of one of these ‘dispersals’ in 1884 into an area called the ‘Skull Pocket’.

    This massacre was described to anthropologist Norman Tindale in 1938 by Jack Kane, who arrived in Cairns in 1882 and actually participated in the ‘dispersal’ at the age of 18.

    Kane described the events as follows:
    “In the Skull Pocket, police officers and native scouts surrounded the black Yidindji camp before dawn; each was armed with a rifle and pistol.
    “At dawn a man opened fire on their camp and the natives began running in the other three directions. These were close-up, easy running shots. The local police rushed in with their sharp knives and killed the children.
    “I didn’t mind the killing of the ‘dollar’, but I didn’t really like them blowing the brains out of the kids.

    “A few years later a man loaded up a crate of skulls and took them away as specimens.”

    Cairns-based historian and author Timothy Bottoms says the Queensland border is devastatingly violent.
    “Tens of thousands of Aboriginal people have been killed on the Queensland border,” he wrote in his 2013 book The Conspiracy of Silence – Queensland’s frontier killing times.

    “I have mapped only some of the massacres in colonial Queensland; I believe this does not represent the true nature of violence at the border.

    It’s understandable why white colonial Queenslanders were ashamed of what they allowed to happen, but why has there been a conspiracy of silence ever since?

    Lani, who survived the massacre, was ‘taken’ to Cairns and then Melbourne when she was about 2 years old, where she was treated by one of Melbourne’s most prominent medical men of the time, Dr. It was ‘given’ to John Blair, presumably to work as a doctor. servant.

    Originally from Scotland, Dr. Blair was instrumental in establishing the Prince Alfred Memorial Hospital.

    3.Dr. Blair.jpg

    Doctor John Blair.

    In 1930, those close to the Blair family wondered how Lani had become Dr. They said he was with Blair.

    Writing in Melbourne’s The Argus newspaper in April 1930, Dr. They described Blair as having a theory that, given equal chances, “the Aboriginal brain will compare better with the ‘white’ brain” or that “an Aboriginal baby who is educated and trained from birth will be more successful”. equal to any English subject or academic.

    “To test his theory, Dr Blair arranged with the captain of an inter-colonial steamer to find him a Queensland native.

    “The first child died on the journey down. “A second attempt allowed Lani to land safely,” they wrote.

    2. Miss Blair.jpg

    Mary Blair and her baby, whom she named Lani, were taken from Far North Queensland to Melbourne after a massacre.

    Newspaper reports at the time state that when Mary Blair, who could not have children, first saw the little black baby “in an old sack, with a pannikin tied to it with a straw band”, her maternal instinct was awakened and she turned into a mother. his mother and he is a loving son”.

    “As was the custom at that time among people who enjoyed a good lifestyle and could afford luxury, Dr. Blair and his wife, Mary, had a staff of Indian servants. One of them – the housekeeper named Lani – had by then been a good and faithful servant.” He remained buried in Sorrento (on the Mornington Peninsula).

    Miss Blair named Lani after her loyal butler.

    5.png

    Lani Musgrave Blair and Mary Blair.

    He was educated at All Saints Grammar School in St Kilda.

    According to correspondence in The Argus, Lani lived a happy life, playing in local parks with her friends and her Scottish terrier dog named Donald Dinnie, under the supervision of her nurse.

    He spent holidays and weekends with the Blairs at the sanatorium in Sorrento, where he often wore a sailor suit.

    Dr Blair died in 1887, aged 53.
    Lani won a prize for writing in 1889, and again in 1890 when she was given the special prize of a writing desk. He also learned to speak French.

    Lani played football, competed in cycling and was a superb cricketer for the Sunbeams cricket team in East Melbourne.

    After moving to St Kilda and attending school there, he was apprenticed to architect Sydney H Wilson. Wilson stated that he had ‘considerable talent for drawing’.

    In 1900, after two years as a student, he went to Albert Park Lake on a Saturday afternoon and as a result caught a cold and succumbed to pneumonia.

    6.png

    Lani Mulgrave Blair passed away at the age of 17.

    Lani was 17 years old.

    Mary Blair lived until 1921, when she spent her final years in Kew Hospital for the Insane.
    Dr and Mrs Blair and their adopted son Lani are buried in the Presbyterian section of Melbourne General Cemetery.
    The inscription reads: “Our dear beloved Lani died on January 18, 1900, at the age of 17.”

    Lani never made it back to her country or the waters of Bana Baddi.

    Harry
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