A song by Ron Milligan

A boy was born to a Wathaurong woman

By a lagoon on the Geelong bay,

Father named him after the Bunyip,

He’d grow him up the traditional way.

By the time he was one Willem Baa Ni ip

Advance of the squatters had begun,

Fyans, the arm of the law of the white man,

Mustered three hundred Wathaurong.

There’s a tomb in Western cemetery,

Minerva road Geelong,

Where seven tribal people rest,

Of the mighty Wathaurong,

I’m haunted by a timeless past

Forty thousand years,

I regret; I can’t forget,

Black history’s buried here.

Invaders shot kangaroo and emu,

Sheep ate up all the daisy yam,

Fortunes were made on the land that was stolen,

From under the feet of the native man.

Robbed and ravaged their lives were broken,

Bush tucker gone they fought and starved,

Whitefellers law proved an empty token,

In just five years their numbers were halved.

And they camped at Toolim Beal

Were the red gum grew,

They camped at Toolim Beal,

Were the black duck flew,

They camped at Toolim Beal

And they dreamed about the past,

No land, no picanninni,

Did the fear they were the last?

One by one they went to the graveyard,

Willem Baa ni ip was left alone,

They called him King but they took his country,

A bitter irony carved in stone.

In the year of Eighteen eighty five,

The man they called King Billy died

But the words on the tombstone tell a lie;

He was not the last of the Barrabool tribe.

There’s a tomb in Western cemetery,

Minerva road Geelong,

Where seven tribal people rest,

Of the mighty Wathaurong,

I’m haunted by a timeless past

Forty thousand years,

I regret; I can’t forget.