Renaming Ben Boyd National Park
21 Nov 2021 by Rev Dr John Squires in: Letters, Thoughts, NewsRenaming Ben Boyd National Park
From Rev Dr John Squires
Presbytery Minister - Wellbeing
Our Presbytery covers country, capital, and coastal regions, as our logo tells. In the coastal area, it stretches southwards, right to the border of NSW and Victoria, where the congregations of Sapphire Coast (Merimbula) and St George’s (Eden) are serving the community of the far south coast. Stretching from Lake Pambula to Twofold Bay, and then onwards south from Boydtown to the state border, along about 50km of rocky coastline and sheltered inlets, is a wonderful natural area, designated as a national park. The area has been under the stewardship of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service since 1971.
The park is known as Ben Boyd National Park, remembering a Scottish entrepreneur of the middle decades of the 19th century, who squatted on quite a number of sites in the south east of the continent, obtaining four landholdings in the Port Phillip district and another fourteen in the Monaro plateau, south of Cooma.
Boyd was an extravagant entrepreneur. He floated a bank in 1839, raising an amount of £200,000; but then, quite unscrupulously, he used those funds to finance his pastoral, shipping and whaling activities. The bank was liquidated in 1846 with heavy losses. Georgina McCrae, who once entertained Boyd at dinner, wrote of him in her diary, “he had the sanguine temperament, exuberant vitality and daring enterprise of the typical adventurer; according to his friend Brierly, he was 'always devising some plan of pleasure or business'.” (Quoted in the article on Boyd by G.P. Walsh in the Australian Dictionary of Biography; see https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/boyd-benjamin-ben-1815)
The portrait of Ben Boyd is held by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. The artist is unknown.
Boyd had squatted on land surrounding Nalluccer, the original Aboriginal name for Twofold Bay, at the southern end of the land cared for by the Yuin people. He invested heavily in the establishment of a port at the location we know as Boydtown, just south of Eden, to provide a base for the whaling industry that he established
Over the course of seven months during 1847, Boyd brought three shiploads of Melanesian men (with 65, 70, and 57 men respectively on each ship) to provide him with labour for his extensive landholdings. Boyd's care for those men was poor; alongside the fact that they were brought to the colony as slaves, a number of them escaped their properties and were found destitute, living in poverty on the streets of Sydney.
This was the first time that men from the Pacific Islands had been imported into Australia as labourers, although some individuals had earlier arrived in Sydney as crews for ships. So concerned was the New South Wales Legislative Council about what was taking place, that it amended the Masters and Servants Act to ban importation of "the Natives of any Savage or uncivilized tribe inhabiting any Island or Country in the Pacific".
Boyd himself left the colony in 1849, to search for gold in California, and then returned to the Solomon Islands, where he lobbied local leaders to form a "Papuan Confederation". It is thought that Boyd was actually looking to get his hands on local resources to boost his finances. Relationships with indigenous locals were fraught.
In October 1851, whilst on a game shooting expedition on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islanders, Boyd went missing. A search party later found Boyd's boat and belt, and an expended firearm cartridge. Some years later, a later British expedition found that Boyd's head had been cut off and his skull kept in a ceremonial house. The skull was purchased and taken to Sydney. (The Sydney Morning Herald reported this on page 5 of its issue dated 4 December 1854; see https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/12963055)
Recent perspectives on Boyd have identified that his unethical practices involved "blackbirding"--that is, using coercion and deception to kidnap people known as "South Sea Islanders", so that they could provide "cheap labour" for landowners in the colony. See https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/sugar-slaves-australias-history-of-blackbirding/
Recently, a decision has been made to rename Ben Boyd National Park, following requests from Aboriginal communities in the region. National Parks and Wildlife Service has advised that “the new name for the park will reflect traditional language and be decided through discussions with local Elders, Aboriginal community representatives, Australian South Sea Islander representatives and Bega Valley Shire Council”. See
This re-assessment of Boyd, and the decision to remove his name from the national,park because of the unacceptable ethics of his business practices, resonates well with the Uniting Church’s commitment to justice. Continuing to commemorate a figure who appears to have been unscrupulous, self-serving, and thoroughly racist, is not a good thing to do. Out of respect to those men who were unjustly enslaved in the “blackbirding” process, the name needs to be changed.
Added to that, we have widespread recognition in Australian society that imposing the names of British colonisers on the natural features of this continent, is also disrespectful—in this instance, to the First Peoples of this land, who have cared for country since time immemorial. Adopting indigenous names from the traditions of the local people is an important element in how we give recognition to these First Peoples.
Referring to Gulaga rather than Mount Dromedary, for instance, or Jungagita in place of Little Dromedary, as examples from the south coast, in the land of the Yuin. Or in Canberra, recognising that the name of the city derives from the Ngunnawal name for “meeting place”—for long before politicians flew in to gather at Parliament House, the peoples of Ngunnawal, Ngambri, Ngarigo, and Wiradjuri nations would gather each year, meeting to Ryan, to eat, to celebrate, and to trade. Certainly, removing the names of foreign colonisers with unjust practices is another way we can acknowledge the longstanding custodianship of the First Peoples of our land.
See further considerations at https://johntsquires.com/2019/01/16/the-profound-effect-of-invasion-and-colonisations/ and https://johntsquires.com/2018/08/13/affirming-the-sovereignty-of-first-peoples-undoing-the-doctrine-of-discovery/