The white woman of Gippsland, or the captive woman of Gippsland, was supposedly a European woman rumoured to have been held against her will by Aboriginal Gunaikurnai people in the Gippsland region of Australia in the 1840s. Her supposed plight excited searches and much speculation at the time, though nothing to put her existence beyond the level of rumour was ever found.
The source of the white woman rumour was a letter written by Angus McMillan, which was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 28 December 1840. The letter described the scene of an Aboriginal camp near Port Albert, where the Aboriginal people had hurriedly vacated on his group's approach. The group had found European items, including female attire. He reported that there was blood on clothing and that it was supposedly 'human blood'. He reported that they found a dead two-year-old European child. He also wrote that he later recollected that there was a white European woman among the Aboriginal people, who had earlier run away from the camp.[1]
McMillan's letter was republished in the Port Phillip Patriot and Melbourne Advertiser on 18 January 1841[2] and the Tasmanian Weekly Dispatch on 22 January 1841,[3] and the legend entered the public imagination.
Accounts of the woman appeared in newspapers after McMillan's letter. In a popular account she was one of two women travelling on the ship Britannia, which wrecked on Ninety Mile Beach in 1841. There were two women aboard, the wife of the Captain and a woman sailing to Sydney to join her fiancé, Mr Frazer.[4] Another account says the woman was a mother who sought protection with local Aboriginal people with her baby girl after leaving her callous and brutal husband.[5]
Another account mentions a heart shape near Sale, carved into both the ground and a tree (from which a farm called Heart Station was named).
Representations to the government by settlers resulted in various searches by police and native police. One expedition left special handkerchiefs that she might come across, with a message in English and Gaelic (because it was thought she might be from the Scottish highlands) reading:
WHITE WOMAN! - There are fourteen armed men, partly White and partly Black, in search of you. Be cautious; and rush to them when you see them near you. Be particularly on the look out every dawn of morning, for it is then that the party are in hopes of rescuing you. The white settlement is towards the setting sun.
The Gunaikurnai people, and specificially the Brataualung tribe, were hunted for what they were imagined to have done. In the 1840s Gunaikurnai were known as the Warrigal Tribe by the European settlers.[6]
In the increasingly contested space of frontier expansion in the 1840s, the white woman stories facilitated settler occupation of territory already ocuupied by Gunaikurnai tribes. They mobilised male adventurers to go in quest of the woman and, in the process, 'discover' new land for settlement.
A Bratauolung boy called Thackewarren was captured and taught English. He was used as an interpreter to tell his people that the white woman must be found. The Commissioner of Crown Lands, Charles Tyers, was delighted when they promised to return her, and on the arranged day preparations were made to receive her. To the utter astonishment of all present, the Aboriginal people arrived with a carved wooden bust of a woman, the figurehead from the ship Britannia.
This figurehead could even have been the source of the rumours all along, in the possession of the Aboriginal people, becoming a real woman in the retelling.[7]