‘Destroy monuments to my family’: Settler descendant’s pain over massacres

A descendant of the first permanent European settlers in Victoria has called for the removal or “ceremonious destruction” of monuments to her family, the Hentys, because of their links to massacres of Aboriginal people.

Suzannah Henty, a sixth-generation descendant of squatter James Henty, said her family had “enslaved” Indigenous people. She listed several recorded massacres on a Henty squatting property in far south-west Victoria, including one where “dozens” of Aboriginal people were killed by a Henty overseer.

The massacres occurred in the 1830s and 1840s. Three Henty brothers had arrived in Portland from 1834, and began squatting illegally on vast areas of inland country in 1836.

“The process of establishing Victoria’s first settlement was war,” Henty said during evidence to the Yoorook Justice Commission, which is inquiring into the ongoing harm to Victoria’s First Nations people caused by European colonisation.

Henty said she became aware of her family’s role in what she called genocide only when she went to university and attended a lecture given by a Gunditjmara man. It prompted her to study what had happened to the Gunditjmara people of south-west Victoria at the hands of white settlers, including her own family.

Her condemnation of her ancestors makes her highly unusual among descendants of Victoria’s squatters, most of whom have proved reluctant to speak publicly about massacres on their old family properties.

Gunditjmara man Chris Saunders leads a smoking ceremony near Portland to remember the spirits of those massacred on the beach.

Henty called on the descendants of other settler families to discuss making reparation to Indigenous communities.

“Benefactors of colonialism, those who have accumulated intergeneration wealth on the basis of land theft and genocide, need to engage in truth-telling about their affluence,” she said.

“I was never told while I was growing up that the Henty family were involved in an organised ethnic cleansing of First Nations peoples.

“Without permission from British authorities, the family illegally squatted on the Gunditjmara homelands, where they stole and damaged tens of thousands of acres of land and waterways. For both the British and First Nations peoples, this settlement was a crime.

“Edward Henty was the first to arrive, where, in his words, he ‘stuck a plough into the ground, struck a she-oak root, and broke the point; cleaned my gun, shot a kangaroo, mended the bellows, blew the forge fire, straightened the plough, and turned the first sod in Victoria’.

“He was performing a colonial ritual, like James Cook did, to enact an invasion based on claims of terra nullius.

“This marks the beginning of the harm that continues to be inflicted on Gunditjmara peoples and their country at the hands of the Henty family, the state of Victoria, and the settler colony of Australia.

“This harm is especially articulated in the ongoing dispossession of Gunditjmara peoples from their land and the memorialisation of colonial figures.”

An audit of monuments in the Glenelg Shire Council, based at Portland, shows there are five statues and memorials specifically dedicated to the Hentys in the shire, most of them in Portland. Of 14 monuments, almost all memorialise the Hentys, the explorer Major Thomas Mitchell, who alerted the Hentys to rich pastoral lands inland in 1836, or early whaler William Dutton, who was in Portland when the Henty brothers arrived.

Only two monuments mention Aboriginal people: one dedicated to Reginald Saunders, Australia’s first Aboriginal military officer, and one known as the Gunditjmara Tribe Memorial.

Henty said to preserve monuments to colonisers such as her descendants was to preserve “a fantasy”, and their fate should be placed in the hands of Indigenous people.

“My personal belief is that the Henty monuments be removed from their intended site and relocated, i.e., to a museum or park to fallen monuments, or ceremoniously destroyed,” she said.

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