Angus McMillan

Angus McMillan ( born August 14, 1810; † May 18, 1865 ) was one of the first explorers and pastoralists in Gippsland in Victoria, Australia. He is also considered the instigator of many massacres of Aborigines in Gippsland.

Youth

Angus McMillan was born in Glenbrittle on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, the fourth son of Ewan McMillan. After a harsh upbringing full of hardships emigrated to Australia from the 1838. In his first position at Captain Lachlan Macalister he could gain experience with the Australian pastoralism in Monaro to guide later the Curawang Station, a sheep station near Delegate,. On one of his expeditions to Ensay he saw for the first time, the level of Gippsland from Mount McLeod and Macalister informed that there could be both pasture and a good place to build a port in the south. An almost fatal ending battle with Aboriginal leaders in that time has probably shaped his view of the natives of this area.

Discoveries

1839 and 1840 began wohlhanbende landowner in New South Wales to be interested in the Gippsland region and funded research into this area. Macalister knew the early settlers in the highlands of Gippsland and Omeo Benambra to because they originally came from Monaro. He suggested McMillan ago as a candidate for further research into the level of Gippsland to the coast. The Polish explorer and scientist Paul Edmund de Strzelecki sent to yourself to explore the Gippsland. Both expeditions attracted by New South Wales through the already populated land around Benambra and Omeo further south to the coast.

McMillan led by various expeditions, which he often indeed was not the first European to visit the areas in question, but his discoveries for the European colonization of the Gippsland were most important. On the last of his early expeditions he found a suitable place for the port region in present-day Port Albert.

The set of McMillan route is still the most important north -south connection through the Gippsland. It follows the Great Alpine Road to the south by the Tambo Valley to Bruthen, then west on the Princes Highway Bairnsdale and Sale along and finally back south to Yarram and Port Albert.

For many decades, the Gippsland was opened only on this north-south axis of Benambra and Omeo to Port Albert, but in the 1860s, a road was built to the east of Melbourne, and this in turn was followed a few decades later the railroad. The trend and the ship traffic on the Gippsland Lakes hosted the traffic in Gippsland for a simpler east-west axis, and let the route via Benambra and Omeo degenerate into a side branch of the main route.

Later life

McMillan occupied himself later land in Gippsland to breed sheep. He was responsible for several massacres of natives who resisted the expropriation of their land and attacking European explorers and settlers. From McMillan -led massacre of the Kurnai, there were at Nuntin, Boney Point, Butchers Creek, Maffra, Warrigal Creek and other, not precisely designated places in Gippsland.

In 1857 he married and had two sons, Ewan and Angus. 1859-1860 he was a member of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria, less than a decade after Victoria had been declared an independent colony ( independent of New South Wales).

Forest fires and floods destroyed the possessions McMillan and although he was recognized as the discoverer of Gippsland, he died in May 1865 on the banks of the Iguana Creek north of Glenaladale without a legacy to leave while he supervised the present Dargo Road in the east Gippsland.