The Eumeralla Wars were the violent encounters over the possession of land between British invaders and Gunditjmara Aboriginal people in what is now called the Western District area of south west Victoria.

The Aboriginal people mostly employed guerrilla tactics and economic warfare against the livestock and property of the British colonists, occasionally killing a shepherd or settler.

[5] Coastal Gunditjmara people first came into regular contact with British colonisers in the early 1830s when whalers such as William Dutton, John Griffiths and the Henty brothers started to establish whaling stations at Portland Bay.

The massacre was recorded in the diary of Edward Henty, first permanent settler in the Port Phillip district who began whaling and sheep farming in the area in late 1834, and is also mentioned in the journals of George Augustus Robinson, the Protector of Aborigines in the region.

[10] In October 1838, after a shepherd was killed at Francis Henty's Merino Downs property, a large number of local Aboriginal people were reportedly massacred along the nearby Wannon River.

[12] Thomas Connell, the manager of Edward Henty's Sandford property resorted to mass poisoning to remove the local people.

[12][3] In May 1840, Patrick Codd a settler who was employed by John Cox at the Mount Rouse property was killed by a group of Aboriginal men assumed to have been led by Alkapurata (also known as Rodger).

The region's government surveyor, Charles Tyers, had shot a number of Gunditjmara at one of the Glenelg's tributaries called the Crawford River.

[3] Killings occurred elsewhere in the region during this year with reports made public that Robert Tulloh of Bochara station would ride out on Sundays and "hunt down blacks and shoot them like kangaroos."

An investigation led by James Blair cleared him of any wrongdoing, even though Tulloh and other colonists admitted to partaking in other punitive expeditions which resulted in many casualties of Aboriginal people.

Bolden faced court in Melbourne in December 1841 but the judge threw the case out, dismissing the accusations against him as "hearsay evidence procured at second hand from the blacks.

"[13] After a lengthy delay, Foster Fyans, the Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Portland District, was able to organise a force of paramilitary Border Police troopers to bring order to the region.

By the start of 1842, severe loss of stock and killing of shepherds by Aboriginal people was centred around land acquired along the Eumeralla River and it was to this area that Fyans proceeded.

Because the victims included women and children, and the attack was unprovoked—the group were not found with sheep nor western clothing, and the families were asleep at the time—the massacre was widely condemned.

Three of the men involved in the attack, Richard Hill, Joseph Betts and John Beswicke, were tried the following year at the Supreme Court in Melbourne but were found not guilty by the jury.

The superintendent, who had a knowledge of the Lubra Creek massacre, responded:The destruction of European property, and even the occasional sacrifice of life, by the hands of the savage tribes among whom you live, if unprovoked and unrevenged, may justly claim sympathy and pity.

Perhaps in response to this petition, Foster Fyans returned to the Port Fairy region with a larger force of 14 Border Police troopers in April 1842.

Browne became a popular author, writing as Rolf Boldrewood, and wrote a chapter about the Eumeralla war in his book Old Melbourne Memories (1896).

Whether the stockmen and shepherds were to blame—as is always said—or whether it was simply the ordinary savage desire for the tempting goods and chattels of the white man, cannot be accurately stated.