The Justification of Joseph Tice Gellibrand: A Thesis

A return to the Frontier History of colonial Victoria, with a focus on cultural understanding and relationship.

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Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

I am a 4th-to-6th generation Australian of Silesian (Prusso-Polish), Welsh, Schwabian-Württemberg German, yeoman English, Scots, & Cornish stock; all free settlers who emigrated between 1848-1893 as colonial pioneers. I am the 2nd of 7 brothers and a sister raised on the income off 23 acres. I therefore belong to an Australian Peasantry which historians claim doesn't exist. I began to have outbreaks of poetry in 1975 when training for a Diploma of Mission Theology in Melbourne. I've since done a BA in Literature and Professional Writing and Post-graduate Honours in Australian History. My poem chapbook 'Compost of Dreams' was published in 1994. I have built a house of trees and mud-bricks, worked forests, lived as a new-pioneer, fathered-n-raised two sons and a daughter, and am now a proud grandfather. I have worked as truck fresh-food farmer, a freelance foliage-provider, been a member of a travelling Christian Arts troupe, worked as duty officer and conflict resolutionist with homeless alcoholic men, been editor/publisher of a Journal of Literature for Christian Pilgrimage, a frontier researcher, done poetry in performance seminars in schools and public events.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Historical Potency and Spiritual Hope

Historical Potency and Spiritual Hope

Gellibrand and Batman were both vigorous and potent men. Each left behind several children. They took certain stellar possibilities and cosmic opportunities that the old world had stifled. The Port Phillip Association’s settlement made by treaty has more to it, likely to involve points of a finer sensibility, -come from beliefs in hope, love or charity, - and not the whitewash of a mere land grab, is made evident in the public mockery of the more Philistine spirits among their peers was already represented in the glib rejections of the newspapers of the day:
‘...relative to the much-talked of new Settlement, we are able to confirm to our readers the result of the British Government’s decision with regard to the pretended claims of Messrs. Bateman, Gellibrand and Co.[s], claims which were in our eyes preposterous in the extreme, and our wonder was and is that men like these should have built such castles in the air for the whole community to laugh at.’[1]

That Batman and Gellibrand would put themselves in the position of laughing stock shows that they were engaging at a frontier differing from the frontier that others could or would read. Then, these ‘castles in air’ they are accused of building have a certain quixotic ring, and why not? for the Christian knight-errantry[2] of Cervantes may be the only appropriate way to approach the key ideals that are at the base of their madness of risks taken across the borders to reach ‘the other’. Castles in the air might be another name for the Kingdom of God, or of the Southland of the Holy Spirit, all of them delightfully extreme and preposterous as anything Don Quiros, Quixote or Jesus Christ set out for. Anyway, a view to build any ‘Jerusalem’ (the City of God’s Peace), would no longer be in England’s green and pleasant land[3], but in the straw-coloured kangaroo-grassed native footpads and hopeful sheepwalks of Geelong and Dutigalla. Well may historic hacks and cynical historians stumble on that greatness of heart! The paradox of obviously highly regarded and eminent men acting outside their time, by attempting to brink a socio-geographical Everest, even if they failed and suffered as they did, should at least intimate to us that they were somewhere else in their thinking, perhaps far ahead on the scales of community-building needed for a world that would grow more borderless with time.


[1]Bent’s News Hobart Town ST. 24 Sept 1836 in Clyde Company Papers Vol II pp 15 Ed: P.L.Brown

[2] J.T. Gellibrand’s Great War soldier-grandson, `was heir to this ‘knight-errant, champion, or paragon’ ‘personal philosophy based on paladin ideals, by which he lived out his life’. Sadler, Peter S. 2000, The Paladin: A Life of Major-General Sir John Gellibrand. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press p.1

[3] William Blake ~ Poems & Prophecies

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