Mordialloc Aboriginal Reserve in Victoria on the coast of Port Phillip Bay was on traditional land of the Bunurong people to which they gradually retreated from surrounding areas after white settlement from the 1850s.

Most had moved, or had been relocated, to Coranderk by the mid-1860s.The Boon Wurrung (or Bunurong) peoples of the Kulin nation lived along the Eastern coast of Port Philip Bay for over 20,000 years before white settlement.

[4] Visible evidence of their shell middens and hand-dug wells remain along the cliffs of Beaumaris,[5][6] and as scar trees from which bark was taken for canoes along Mordialloc Creek.

[7] The Bunurong first encountered white Europeans when in February 1801 Lady Nelson sailed into Port Phillip and they met crewmen who had landed at what is now Sorrento where in 1803 David Collins disembarked with 467 convicts, leaving after eight months after finding the site "unpromising and unproductive".

[11] William Thomas[12][13] had been appointed Guardian of the Yarra and Western Port tribes of in 1850, having been Assistant Protector since 1837,[14][15] and since 1853 was to have regularly supplied them blankets and food, a task he delegated in Mordialloc to a local squatter Mr A. V.