It is likely that stockkeepers, kangaroo hunters and timber-cutters ( convicts assigned to colonial landowners) moved in advance of settlers to the fringes of the Ben Lomond escarpment and up the South Esk Valley.

[2] Aboriginal people often traded at the frontier with assigned men, the currency being food, sexual favours and hunting dogs.

[9] Unusually, a Plangermaireener witness, Temina, gave evidence under translation at trial in Launceston and he stated that the two men were speared to death and further mutilated by women of his people who 'crushed his head with a stone' In subsequent years, there are several records of disputes at the frontier - with killing of cattle and retributive violence on both sides.

During the Black War, the remaining Aboriginal Clansmen of the Plangermaireener prosecuted a desperate campaign of harassment and theft along the South Esk and Nile valleys.

[2] John Batman and Anthony Cottrell were both involved in Roving Parties, essentially bounty hunters contracted to remove Aboriginal people from contested areas by force.

It was reported in August 1829 that violence had escalated around the Deddington area, culminating in the fatal spearing of an assigned of the settler, Lord.

John Batman describes in his letters of July 1830 how he had dispatched women of the Ben Lomond Nation along tracks around their 'usual haunts' around Stacks Bluff and to Pigeons Plains -the Nile Valley near Lilyburn Bridge, north of Deddington.

[4] By the 1840s the remnant peoples of the Ben Lomond nation had long been exiled to Flinders Island and there was sufficient settler population in the Deddington area for a chapel to be constructed above the Nile River.