It was a hard ride, the slope getting steeper, the landscape below spreading forever, but we had the hill and a fast dusty track to ourselves.

Drifting around south-west Victoria the other day, I drove out to the hill to check the authenticity of memory. The track was still there among the trees, the slope as terrifyingly steep, the view as extensive as ever.

The place has come to assume a treasured spot in my personal dreaming, but it has a larger, barely whispered role in Australian history.

The old volcano is known as Mount Eckersley. It rises above the small town of Heywood. A branch of my family a century ago lived and laboured up there on the grazing station, Oakbank, that flows over the hill and boasts a fine bluestone homestead.

In a corner of the property, however, not far from our childhood billy-carting adventures, exists a ruin with the power to haunt.

A stone chimney stands above broken stone walls, the roof and the floorboards gone. 

Decades ago, the station owner set fire to the place to rid it of rabbits, and few enough now know of its existence. Others want to forget it altogether.

A couple of mates recently jogged my memory of it, for they had climbed fences to assure themselves of its continued existence.

In this most unlikely of places, almost lost in time, is one of the few physical remnants of the turbulent, complicated period that sought to destroy one of the oldest societies on Earth.

Here are the remains of the Mt Eckersley barracks of what was known as the Native Police Corps.

Native (indigenous) police were stationed, off and on, with white mounted police on Mt Eckersley from 1843 to 1849.

Their job was to “pacify” people of their own race and to protect white settlers from the “depredations” of the original inhabitants who were objecting violently to having their land and their lives stolen.

Indeed, 1842 became known for the “Eumeralla War” between indigenous people who sheltered in the rugged lava fields not far from Mt Eckersley in an area known as The Stones, and the squatters who had guns and horses.

The superintendent of the Port Phillip District (and later Victorian Governor) Charles La Trobe, besieged with calls for assistance from the squatters and appalled at reports of massacres by whites, supported a scheme to recruit indigenous men to help bring order.

Naively, he considered the formation of the Native Police Corps would “at once form a link between the native and the European, and (offer) many opportunities for the establishment of friendly relations”.

And so, under the leadership of a white constable, Henry E. P. Dana, a troop of indigenous elders, mainly from areas around Melbourne, were mounted up and taken west to track and pacify “wild blacks”.

Stationed high on the volcanic slope of Mt Eckersley, so far from their own country they might have been on Mars, the black police proved deadly efficient.

One of their first tasks in 1843 was to hunt down a group of Aborigines thought to have kidnapped two-year-old Martha Ward, the daughter of Arrandoovong (now Branxholme) publican Abraham Ward and his wife Harriet.

Evidence was found the child had been killed, and the hunt escalated into an expedition to also exact retribution for the killing of a grazier, Christopher Bassett. When indigenous locals were found with a mob of Bassett’s sheep by a swamp, Dana and his black troopers attacked. Nine Aboriginal men were shot dead.

“The lesson they have been taught lately,” declared Dana of the indigenous people of The Stones, “I trust will have the effect of deterring them from attacking the lives and property of the settlers.”

Within a month another patrol of native police, on the trail of Aborigines thought to have robbed a bullocky not far from Mt Eckersley, killed at least two indigenous men. 

One of the native police later claimed the troopers were ordered to take no prisoners and boasted of killing 17 men on a single occasion. And so it went.

A reliable total of those killed by the native police and the mounted troopers will never be known, though some historians put the number at 125 or more. Having been used to terrorise, some of the native police deserted. 

One local elder who had been recruited, Billebary, shed his uniform and did his best to turn his fellow troopers against the whole sorry business.

The native police scheme in Victoria foundered, and by the time Mt Eckersley barracks was abandoned in 1849, the “war” was all but over. 

Most of the remaining indigenous people of western Victoria were scattered, shattered and “pacified”, and the former Native Police, their status gone, drifted into their own desolation.

It took until almost a century and a half before the descendants of the people of The Stones were finally returned some of the land, which can be seen from the hill, for which their ancestors had suffered and lost so much.

And on the slopes of a volcano, a ruin lies forgotten, as if it has no part yet in our remembering.?The Age