How a boy who was kidnapped after the massacre found himself in the midst of Melbourne society

Warning: This story contains the name of a deceased Aboriginal person and brutal details of the massacre.

Once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it.

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

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

His name was Lani Mulgrave Blair.

Lani Blair Musgrave.

It is in the center of Karl Koehler’s painting Flemington Derby.

Austrian-born Kahler arrived in Melbourne in 1885 and established a successful portrait practice, but is best remembered for three large 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 approximately 200 figures, 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 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 at the Victorian Racing Club in Flemington.

Aboriginal Men and Boys from the Mulgrave District.

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

He was born about 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 Yidinji Nation. (Eight clan groups make up the Yidinji nation.)

Mulgrave River Aboriginal Camp. Archibald Meston Album 1905.jpg

Mulgrave River Aboriginal Camp. credit: Archibald Meston Album 1905

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

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

Steamships made regular runs along the coast and into the Mulgrave River to land both supplies and fortune seekers.

As settlement spread, Yidinji clans and family groups were wiped out in a series of massacres or “dispersals” from 1880 onwards.

Aboriginal canoes on the Mulgrave River_john oxley Library.jpg

Canoeing on the Mulgrave River. credit: John Oxley Library

Lani was one of the few survivors of one of those “crackdowns” in 1884 in an area called “Skull Pocket.”

The carnage was told to the anthropologist Norman Tyndale in 1938 by Jack Kane, who had arrived in Cairns in 1882 and who actually took part in the “crush” when he was 18 years old.

Kane described the events:

“In the Skull Pocket, police and local trackers surrounded the black Yidinji camp before dawn, each armed with a rifle and a revolver.

“At daybreak one man fired into their camp, and the natives fled in three other directions. These were light running shots, close-ups. The local police broke in with knives and killed the children.

“I wasn’t against killing the bucks, but I didn’t really like how they scolded the kids.

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

Cairns-based historian and author Timothy Bottoms says the Queensland frontier was incredibly brutal.

“Many tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were killed on the Queensland frontier,” he wrote in his 2013 book Conspiracy of Silence.

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

One can understand why white colonial Queenslanders were ashamed of what they had allowed to happen, but why the conspiracy of silence since then?

After surviving the massacre, Lani was ‘taken’ at the age of about 2 to Cairns and then to Melbourne, where he was ‘given’ to one of Melbourne’s leading doctors at the time, Dr John Blair, presumably to work as a domestic servant.

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

Dr. John Blair.

In 1930, people close to the Blair family told how Lani got to Dr. Blair.

Writing in Melbourne’s Argus in April 1930, they recounted how Dr. Blair had a theory that, given equal chances, “the brain of an aboriginal will compare more favorably with that of a ‘white'” or that an aboriginal infant trained and ” taught from birth, will be equal to any British subject or scholar.

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

“The first child died while swimming. A second attempt resulted in Lani landing safely,” they wrote.

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

Newspapers of the time note that when Mary Blair, who could not have children, first saw the little black baby in “an old pannicon sack tied to it with a ribbon of hay, a mother’s instinct was awakened and she became a mother to him, and he a loving son “.

“According to the custom of the time 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 is buried.”

Mrs. Blair named Lani after her faithful butler.

Lani Musgrave Blair and Mary Blair.

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

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

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

Dr. Blair died aged 53 in 1887.

In 1889, Laney won a writing prize, and in 1890, when he won a special desk prize. He also learned to speak French.

Lani played football, cycled 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 stated that he “had considerable skill in drawing”.

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

Lani Mulgrave Blair, who died at the age of 17.

Lana was 17.

Mary Blair lived until 1921, her last years at Kew Hospital for the Insane.

Dr and Mrs Blair and their adopted son Lani are buried in the Presbyterian section of the Melbourne General Cemetery.

The inscription reads: “Our dear Lani died January 18, 1900, aged 17.”

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