Farmers looked to the sky, willing it to rain. The grazing land on volcanic soil around here was once known as The Green Hills. 

It would be remembered as the great drought of 1914-15. It would be remembered for something worse. The start of the Great War.

The war would leave lasting scars upon Condah, just as it did on every other district, town and city in Australia.

Condah, however, was not quite the same as every other Australian district. Of the 42 men who marched away from little Condah, 14 of them — a third of the total — were known in the vernacular of the time as blackfellas.

In a time of White Australia, they had to fight just to get the right to fight. Five of them, the Lovetts, were brothers.

Four of those brothers would re-enlist for World War II, alongside their younger brother Samuel, and their descendants — 23 altogether — have fought in every Australian war, right up to Afghanistan.

Not one of them or their indigenous mates got a patch of soldier settlement land on which they had been born, and which had been stolen from their ancestors.

They and the white men of Condah were descended only a generation or two back from another war in which their people had fought each other across the grasslands, forests and swamps of the district.

Yet they would go to battle side by side in Gallipoli, Palestine and the Western Front.

With the centenary of Anzac approaching, Maryanne Martin, a descendant of several Great War soldiers and the great niece of one of the men who never came back, Norman (Scotty) McLeod, organised a “facilitated community conversation” that brought together descendants of World War I soldiers from Condah.

The story of Scotty McLeod underlines the wretched and random nature of what war does to soldiers.

A sportsman, poet and a bit of a larrikin, McLeod made it through Gallipoli and the battles of the Western Front only to be killed by an artillery shell while he slept in a barn behind the lines on May 31, 1918, with the war’s end less than six months away.

But the “conversation” unearthed a deeper history that vests Condah with a significance far beyond its size in the wider Australian story.

Another Condah-born man, Tim Gurry, of Ryebuck Media, found it so gripping he made a film of it: In the Footsteps of Condah’s Anzacs.

Condah ­ barely exists now beyond a pub and a public hall, a lonely cemetery and a scattering of dwellings and farmsteads. In 1915 there was a general store, a bank, post office, three functioning churches — Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian — a state school, a cheese and butter factory and the old Green Hills Hotel.

Down the track a few kilometres and encircled by forest was the Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission. Here, the lava flow from nearby Mt Eccles  and the wetlands had supported one of Australia’s most remarkable indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

Their sophisticated fish and eel trapping and smoking system  was so successful the Gunditjmara people had no need of the roaming life: they settled in large villages of houses with stone walls.

During the 1840s and beyond, however, they were forced to use the lava flow as a citadel to wage battle against squatters who had come to the flatlands beyond to appropriate their hunting land and to send out shepherds — a lot of them brutalised former convicts with a taste for blood and Aboriginal women. The Gunditjmara fought back.

It became known as the Eumeralla War. The end of the battles began when the superintendent of the Port Phillip District (and later governor of Victoria), Charles La Trobe, sent Mounted Troopers and Native Police from Melbourne. Slaughter ensued, the war raged and stuttered for a decade and more, and ended in starvation among Indigenous survivors.

The remnants of the Gunditjmara and their side of the Eumeralla War found a form of sanctuary in the stone country when the Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission was established in 1868.

By the outbreak of the First World War 46 years later, about 60 Indigenous people lived at the mission.

They ran their own farm and attended a handsome stone church they had built themselves and were denied the right of speaking their own language or practising their old Indigenous crafts.

Then came the new war on the other side of the world.

As British-Australian farm boys, men of the village and labourers went to Hamilton to sign up, the Gunditjmara men of Lake Condah decided they wished to join up.

They had no citizenship, no right to vote; no rights even to become soldiers.

On March 16, 1916, 11 men from Lake Condah Mission marched through the streets of Hamilton demanding to be recruited. Eight were accepted “and the men were heartily congratulated on their patriotism”. They had been judged to have “sufficient white blood”.

Two weeks later, the Portland Guardian reported “great indignation” that the military authorities had turned around and refused “the acceptance of a batch of men from Condah mission after they had passed the medical examination and made final arrangements to go into camp”.

As recruiting got harder, more of these men were found to have sufficient white blood and were accepted, though Chris Saunders, the father of Reg Saunders, who would later become Australia’s first indigenous military officer, was knocked back because he was “too black”.

The men of Lake Condah clearly recognised the chance to gain some form of equality in uniform.

Australian soldiers were the best paid of World War I. A private got five shillings a day and another shilling deferred until he was discharged. The wry called them “six bob a day tourists”, and the throwaway line would come to annoy the soldiers.

One in four men who left Condah, including those from Lake Condah, were killed. A third of the remainder were wounded. Almost all, from family anecdote, were psychologically injured.

The first of the Condah boys to go to Gallipoli was Charles Wesley Adamson, 26, who lived on his family’s farm at Myamyn, halfway between Condah village and the Lake Condah Mission. He wrote to his mother as he sailed from Australia in July, 1915: 

“I suppose it will be a while before I get home to Australia again. I think that I will be home in about six months’ time. I don’t think the war will last any more than six months myself ... I can tell you that I would not cry if when we got over there to hear that the war was stopped.”

He was killed on Gallipoli’s hills on December 6, 1915. Two days later, the British cabinet announced its decision to evacuate the Anzac sector.

The very first of the Condah men to sign up was a farm labourer named David Millard, though his fate was not to be in Gallipoli.

Millard, 33, was assigned to the 4th Mobile Veterinary Section of the Australian Imperial Force. He sailed away in December 1914 and returned to Australia in April 1918, a destroyed man.

Mustard gas, had crept upon him on the Western Front, he told his family. His war record shows “chronic bronchitis due to active service, exposure and strain”. It killed him within six months of his return. 

The first of the indigenous men to enlist from Lake Condah were two brothers, Allan, 27, and Joe McDonald, age unknown, who both joined the Light Horse, somehow slipping through White Australia’s Defence Act.

Allan was a scout in Gallipoli before suffering a fractured leg. After the war, he and his wife Maisie had eight children, but when Maisie died, seven of them were taken against Allan McDonald’s will and placed in the Geelong Orphanage.

Joe got through to the Western Front before being wounded in France and having his leg amputated. Another McDonald from Lake Condah Mission, George, 24, joined the 5th Battalion, survived and went on to enlist again when World War II came around. Enlisting in World War I proved a trial for not only indigenous men. 

My grandfather, John Wallace Malseed, from a farm right across the road from Wes Adamson in Myamyn, was initially ruled unfit because he had suffered a bone disease in his leg as a child.

His humiliation became unbearable when a woman handed him a white feather — the silent damnation denoting cowardice — in the streets of Hamilton.

Pressure to sign up was immense. Patriotism rallies were held at the Condah hall from late 1914.

My grandfather found a doctor in Bendigo who and got the go-ahead to enlist. At 21, he went to the Western Front as part of the 14th Battalion.

He was wounded by gunshot in the Battle of Polygon Wood near Ypres, Belgium in September 1917, and again near Villers-Bretonneux in France in late March 1918, leaving him to carry shrapnel in his back for the rest of his life. 

Recovering in a hospital in Birmingham, England, he fell in love with his nurse, Cecilia Wilks. They married, and she became my grandmother. 

They discovered after the war there was a line drawn through Condah that didn’t limit itself to colour. My grandfather was Presbyterian; Cecilia was Irish Catholic. Sectarianism ran deep, even in families. 

My grandfather’s family was shocked to find a Catholic in it.

The indigenous men of Lake Condah were never to get land for themselves. Country set aside for the mission was split up for soldier settlement after the First World War and again after the Second, and the mission was closed.

Many of its residents, having no other home stayed until the 1950s, when the authorities and the Anglican Church employed a contractor to put 13 sticks of gelignite into the bluestone church built by indigenous hands in the 1880s.

Herbert Lovett, a machine-gunner in France who played organ in church, was met by official silence when he asked to be considered for a settlement block under the 1917 Discharged Soldiers Settlement Act.

His brothers, Light Horsemen Edward and Frederick, 12th Battalion soldier Alfred and Leonard, wounded in 1917 when fighting with the 39th Battalion, got the same treatment, just like all the other soldiers from the mission.

Shortly after the Great War, the five brothers walked in their uniforms to Condah’s Greenvale Hotel and asked, as soldiers, to be given a drink.

They were refused because they were Aboriginal. It was an indignity too far. They locked the barman out, shot every bottle on the shelves and walked home singing. 

If they could not have a drink that day, nor could any others, and their white mates from the war made sure police did not become involved.

When the matter of land was raised again after the Lovetts and others had served during World War II, the Portland Shire Council in July 1944 resolved unanimously to demand that the government should not take further land from the indigenous people, and that it be set aside, not for white soldier settlers, but “for use by the Aboriginal people and their descendants”.

This fell on deaf ears, as did the call from the nearby Heywood branch of the RSL.

Herbert Lovett eventually hitched horses to a timber house at the mission and dragged it 12 kilometres through the bush to a little block by the Sunday Creek outside Heywood.

His brother, Frederick, who had been living with his family in a tent at the mission, was given another house by the Hamilton Uplift Society, and it sat alongside Herbert’s.

The families, with no power and a long walk to town, called the place Greenvale. The two brothers and their wives, Mary and Emma, raised 15 children in those houses, and later embraced the families of their grown children.

One of Herbert’s sons, elder John Lovett, a country singer, has spent years fighting for compensation for the farm his father never got.

He calls his quest by a military term, “repatriation”, and has expert advice that the foregone benefit and worth of the land would be, in today’s dollars, $5.385 million.

In 1988, the state and federal governments finally got around to returning the Lake Condah Mission site to the Gunditjmara community. 

In 2007, the Federal Court ruled that the Gunditjmara had native title to 133,000 hectares of vacant Crown land, national parks, reserves, rivers and the sea, and a new generation is discovering its history.

One of Frederick Lovett’s daughters, elder Laura Bell, helped rescue the World War I honour board from the destroyed mission church. 

It hangs now in Heywood’s Anglican church, inscribed with the names of all the boys who left the mission for the Great War. ?— The Age