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    • How a boy stolen after a massacre ended up in the middle of Melbourne society
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    How a boy stolen after a massacre ended up in the middle of Melbourne society

    Pabio 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 unsee it.

    It is simply called “No”. 41: Mrs Blair’s Aborigine.

    But who was he? How does it end up in Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country and a 19th century group portrait of the who’s who of Melbourne?

    His name was Lani Mulgrave Blair.

    1. Lani (Blair) Mulgrave.jpg

    Lani Mulgrave Blair.

    He is at the center of Carl Kahler’s painting Derby day at Flemington.

    Kahler, born in Austria, arrived in Melbourne in 1885 and established a successful portrait practice, but is best remembered for three major works depicting Melbourne’s Flemington Racecourse.
    immortalizes the day – Saturday October 30, 1886 – when Trident won the Victoria Racing Club Derby.
    This is an important 19th century group portrait, consisting of around 200 figures and depicting 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 Canberra at the National Portrait Gallery, the National Library of Australia, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the original is on display at the Victorian Racing Club of Flemington.

    Image1.png

    Aboriginal men and boys of the Mulgrave district.

    Lani’s story begins about 2,800km north in Far North Queensland.

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

    He belonged to 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 Mulgrave River. Credit: Archibald Meston Album 1905

    The Mallanbarra are known as the flat rock/stony river people, mallan meaning flat or stony rock and barra meaning people belonging to or people of the Mulgrave River. (The river is traditionally known as Bana Baddi).

    By the early 1880s alluvial gold had been discovered in the area and the Mulgrave River Goldfield was proclaimed.

    Steamships made regular trips along the coast and into the Mulgrave River to drop off supplies and men seeking their fortune.

    As settlements expanded, Yidindji clans and family groups were decimated following a series of massacres or “dispersals” starting in 1880.

    Aboriginal canoe on the Mulgrave River_john oxley Library.jpg

    Canoeing on the Mulgrave River. Credit: John Oxley Library

    Lani was one of the only survivors of one of these “dispersals” in 1884 in an area called “Skull Pocket”.

    This massacre was recounted to the anthropologist Norman Tindale in 1938 by Jack Kane, who arrived in Cairns in 1882 and who actually participated in the “dispersal” when he was 18 years old.

    Kane described the events:
    “At Skull Pocket, police and native trackers surrounded a Yidindji black camp before dawn, each man armed with a rifle and a revolver.
    “At dawn a man fired on their camp and the natives rushed in three other directions. They were easy shots, close-ups. The native police rushed in with their scrubbing knives and killed the children.
    “I didn’t mind the ‘males’ being killed, but I didn’t really like them bothering the kids.

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

    Timothy Bottoms, a Cairns-based historian and author, says the Queensland frontier was devastatingly violent.
    “Several tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were killed on the Queensland frontier,” he wrote in his 2013 book Conspiracy of Silence – Queensland’s frontier kill times.

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

    We can understand why the white settlers of Queensland were ashamed of what they had allowed to happen, but why this conspiracy of silence since then?

    Surviving the massacre, Lani was “taken” at the age of about 2 to Cairns, then to Melbourne, where he was “entrusted” to one of Melbourne’s most eminent doctors at that time, Dr John Blair, probably to work as a doctor. domestic.

    Dr. Blair, a native of Scotland, was instrumental in the founding of the Prince Alfred Memorial Hospital.

    3. Dr. Blair.jpg

    Dr. John Blair.

    In 1930, those close to the Blair family recounted how Lani had ended up with Dr. Blair.

    Writing in Melbourne’s The Argus newspaper in April 1930, they reported that Dr Blair had a theory that, given equal odds, “the Aboriginal brain would compare favorably with the ‘white’ brain” or that an Aboriginal baby trained and ” educated from birth would be equal to any British subject or scholar.

    “To test his theory, Dr Blair arranged with a captain of one of the intercolonial liners to get him a native of Queensland.

    “The first child died during the trip. A second attempt allowed Lani to land safely,” they wrote.

    2. Mrs. Blair.jpg

    Mary Blair and the baby she named Lani, who was taken from far north Queensland to Melbourne after a massacre.

    Newspapers of the time note that when Mary Blair – who could not have children – first saw the little black baby in an “old bag with a pannikin tied to it with a strip of hay, a maternal instinct woke up and she became his mother, and he a loving son.”

    “As was the custom at the time among people who lived in good style and could afford such luxuries, Dr Blair and his wife Mary had had a team of Indian servants. One of them – the butler named Lani – remained a good and faithful servant until he died in Sorrento (on the Mornington Peninsula) where he lies buried.

    Mrs. Blair named Lani after her faithful butler.

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    Lani Musgrave Blair and Mary Blair.

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

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

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

    Dr. Blair died at the age of 53 in 1887.
    In 1889 Lani won a writing prize, and again in 1890, when he received a special prize for a desk. He also learned to speak French.

    Lani played football, competed in cycle races and became an excellent cricketer for the Sunbeams cricket team in East Melbourne.

    After moving to St Kilda and attending school there, he was apprenticed to the architect Sydney H Wilson, who said “he had considerable drawing skills”.

    In 1900, after serving two years as a pupil, one Saturday afternoon he ventured into Lake Albert Park, which caused him to catch a cold and succumb to pneumonia.

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    Lani Mulgrave Blair, died at the age of 17.

    Lani was 17 years old.

    Mary Blair lived until 1921, her final years at 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 beloved Lani, died on January 18, 1900, at the age of 17.”

    Lani never returned to his country or to the waters of Bana Baddi.

    Pabio
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