Newstead 1859: ‘a sort of border country or No Man’s Land’

This is the first chapter of the book 'The Newstead District Murders 1857-1859' by Dr Adrian R. Haas. The first two chapters are available online. The rest of the book may be read by purchasing the book from the Newstead & District Historical Society.

Newstead 1859:   ‘a sort of border country or No Man’s Land’

A distressed, blood soaked, and almost incoherent man, burst into the Newstead Hotel just after dusk on the evening of Wednesday 6th April 1859.

The hotel patrons soon discovered that there had just been a brutal unprovoked attack across the nearby Loddon River. The victim was the wife of a Hungarian hawker. The hawker and his family had been traveling through the district, and had decided to stop overnight at Newstead. There was little warning that the attack was imminent. By the time help reached the insensible woman, she bled to death.

This was the fourth murder in the Newstead district between 1857 and 1859.

This murder came barely a year after the discovery of an unidentified body in a Mia Mia Creek waterhole located on the edge of the Newstead township. Despite the best efforts of the Victoria Police, that crime remained unsolved, and would remain so for many years to come.

Preceding the Mia Mia body in the waterhole case, had been two murders which took place nearby in 1857. The first murder was the cold blooded shooting of a hard working miner, by a local storekeeper, at Green Gully in January 1857. The second murder was a knife attack on a butcher at the Mia Mia goldfield, by his wife, in June 1857.

The April 1859 murder was the last straw for many citizens of Newstead, who felt that the district lacked effective policing. Consequently, on the evening of 12th April 1859,  a group of leading members of the Newstead community1 gathered together for a meeting at the Newstead Hotel, to consider the recent spate of murders which had occurred in the district, and to call for the establishment of a permanent police presence at Newstead.

The Newstead Hotel meeting asserted that as things stood, the district was:

‘left entirely defenceless, to the tender mercies of ruffians and vagabonds who             appear especially to affect this locality.’ ---- ‘a sort of border country or No Man’s Land. It was stated, and is well known that the neighbouring gullies were the favorite haunts of the chief horse and cattle stealers of the Province, and that this was entirely due to the known absence of any local protection.’ 

The meeting stridently demanded that the government take immediate action to provide police protection at Newstead, and this subsequently occurred.

This book seeks to investigate these four murders, which took place in and around Newstead in the frontier period of the late 1850’s.