SWANSTON

Captain Charles Swanston was a merchant, banker and politician. He was a financial backer of the Port Phillip Association.

The Port Phillip Association, under the leadership of John Pascoe Fawkner and John Batman was a small organisation populated by cunning entrepreneurs and businessmen. The Port Phillip Association expertly manufactured documents written in arcane legal language, which portended to legitimise the buying and selling of unceded Kulin land in the Port Phillip district.

The association operated on the pretense that Wurundjeri land had been acquired in the process of John Batman’s bogus treaty with Wurundjeri elders. This process involved John Batman obtaining some written marks from Wurundjeri elders on a document, in exchange for: ‘twenty pair of blankets, thirty tomahawks, one hundred knives, fifty pair scissors, thirty looking glasses, two hundred handkerchiefs, and one hundred pounds of flour’, and henceforth claiming that the Wurundjeri people had surrendered their land to the colonists. The Wurundjeri people did no such thing.

The Port Phillip Association worked actively against the Kulin Nations as well as the colonial government to stake illegitimate land claims of massive areas, at great profit.

“These men [involved in the Port Phillip Association] were involved in very influential circles and knew how to weasel their way around Governor Arthur’s instructions. Batman, Fawkner, Gellibrand, Charles Swanston, and others were the most celebrated business people in the colony and their plot to gazump the authorities and real owners of the land is still celebrated in Australia as the bringing of light to the heathen wasteland instead of the white shoe brigade land sham it really was.”

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“They were eager to see the lands populated by like-minded individuals in order to thwart the government’s purposes, and to murder and disperse the black population in order to secure the ‘peace’.”

- Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground