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How a boy stolen after a massacre found himself at the center of Melbourne society

Posted on by L. Dreeye
How a boy stolen after a massacre found himself at the center of Melbourne society

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

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

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

His name was Lani Mulgrave Blair.

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Lani Blair Musgrave.

He is in the center of the painting by Karl Kahler. Derby Day at Flemington.

Kahler, born in Austria, arrived in Melbourne in 1885 and began a successful portrait practice, but is best remembered for three major works depicting Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne.
commemorates the day – Saturday 30 October 1886 – when Trident won the Victoria Racing Club Derby.
This is an important nineteenth-century group portrait of around 200 figures, depicting many of Melbourne’s leading citizens, including Sir Henry Broom Loch (Governor of Victoria) and the Duke of Manchester.

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

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Aboriginal men and boys from the Mulgrave area.

Lani’s story begins about 2800km 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 Coeur range.

He was from the Mullanbarra people of the Yidinji people. (Eight clan groups make up the Yidinji nation.)

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Aboriginal camp on the Mulgrave River. Credit: Archibald Meston’s 1905 album

The Mullanbarra are known as the flat rock/rocky river people, mullan meaning flat rock or rocky and barra meaning the Mulgrave River people or Mulgrave River people. (The river is traditionally known as Bana Baddi).

In the early 1880s, placer gold was discovered in the region and the Mulgrave River gold deposit was declared.

Steamboats made regular trips along the coast and into the Mulgrave River to bring both supplies and people seeking their fortune.

As settlements expanded, Yidinji clans and family groups were wiped out after a series of massacres or “dispersals” beginning in 1880.

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Canoeing on the Mulgrave River. Credit: John Oxley Library

Lani was one of the few who survived one of these “dispersals” in 1884 in an area called the Skull Pocket.

The massacre was reported to anthropologist Norman Tyndale in 1938 by Jack Kane, who arrived in Cairns in 1882 and actually took part in the crackdown when he was 18 years old.

Kane described the events:
“At Skull Pocket, police and local trackers surrounded a camp of black Yidinji before dawn, each armed with a rifle and revolver.
“At dawn a man opened fire on their camp, and the natives fled in three other directions. These were light strikes at close range. The local police rushed in with their cleaning knives and killed the children.
“I didn’t mind killing the bucks, but I didn’t really like them messing with the kids.

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

Timothy Bottoms, a Cairns-based historian and writer, says the Queensland frontier was extremely brutal.
“Many tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were killed on the Queensland border,” he wrote in his 2013 book, Conspiracy of Silence – The Times of the Queensland Frontier Murders.

“I have only mapped some of the massacres in colonial Queensland; I am convinced that it does not reflect the true nature of border violence.

One can understand why white colonial Queenslanders were ashamed of what they allowed to happen, but why has there been a conspiracy of silence since then?

Having survived the massacre, Lani, aged about two years, was “taken” to Cairns and then to Melbourne, where he was “given” to one of Melbourne’s most prominent doctors of the time, Dr John Blair, supposedly to work as a doctor. domestic servant.

Dr Blair, originally from Scotland, was instrumental in the creation of the Prince Alfred Memorial Hospital.

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Dr John Blair.

In 1930, people close to the Blair family revealed how Lani ended up with Dr. Blair.

They reported in the Melbourne Argus in April 1930 that Dr Blair had a theory that, given equal chances, “the Aboriginal brain would compare favorably with the ‘white’ brain” or that a trained and “born-educated” Aboriginal infant would to any British subject or scholar.

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

“The first child died during the descent. The second attempt resulted in Lani landing safely,” they wrote.

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Mary Blair and the child she named Lani, who was taken from Far North Queensland to Melbourne after the massacre.

Newspapers of the time noted that when Mary Blair, who was unable to have children, first saw a small black child in “an old pan-sack tied to it with hay ribbon, her maternal instinct was awakened, and she became his mother, and he loving son.”

“As was then common among people who lived in good style and could afford luxury, Dr. Blair and his wife Mary had a staff of Indian servants. One of them, a butler named Lani, remained a good and faithful servant until he died in Sorrento (on the Mornington Peninsula), where he was 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’ Grammar School in St Kilda.

According to correspondence in The Argus, Lani led a happy life, playing in local parks with his friends and his dog, a Scotch terrier named Donald Dinny, under the care of his nurse.

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

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

Lani played soccer, raced bicycles and became a great cricketer for the Sunbeams in East Melbourne.

After moving to St Kilda and attending school there, he was apprenticed to the architect Sidney H. Wilson, who stated that he “possessed considerable skill in drawing.”

In 1900, after serving as an apprentice for two years, he ventured into Albert Park Lake one Saturday afternoon, as a result of which he caught a cold and died of pneumonia.

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Lani Mulgrave Blair died at the age of 17.

Lani was 17.

Mary Blair lived until 1921, her last years in Kew Mental Hospital.
Dr and Mrs Blair and their adopted son Lani are buried in the Presbyterian section of the Melbourne General Cemetery.
The inscription reads: “Our dearly beloved Lani, died January 18, 1900, aged 17 years.”

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