Much like the
Bidawal lands of far eastern
Gippsland, early European settlers thought the Otway peninsula was an impenetrable haven for an indeterminate number of Aboriginal people, who used its impenetrable and cold rainforest as a refuge, while venturing out at times to filch food and blankets from outstations. In doing so, however, they were not known for resorting to "savage violence". According to native
oral history, the Gadubanud were wiped out in a war when neighbouring tribes set fire to their forests, causing them to expire through suffocation. They appear to have been regarded as "wild blacks" by their neighbours, the
Wathaurong to the northeast and the
Girai wurrung on their west. However, Norman Tindale dates their extinction to some years after the beginnings of European colonisation of the area. From notes made by the
chief Protector of Aborigines,
George Robinson, who came across three members of the tribe at the mouth of the
Hopkins River in 1842, some beyond their traditional lands, in
Djagurd territory, it has been surmised that they had some linguistic affiliation with this group. That year they appear to have robbed an outstation for food and blankets In March 1846, on his third attempt to penetrate the Otway area, the district superintendent for
Port Philip Bay,
Charles La Trobe, encountered seven Gadubanud men and women in the Aire Valley. On the
Gellibrand River a month later, Henry Allan found one of their camps, full of implements, and in mid-winter of the same year, the surveyor George D Smythe came across eight: a man, four women and three boys. The group assisted Smythe by pointing out the track leading to Gunna-waar Creek (Airedale), and, in gratitude, Smythe issued them with a note instructing his
coxswain to provide them with flour at Blanket Bay. Four days later, he heard that one member of his party, the seaman James Conroy, had been killed by a local native, though the circumstances leading to his death are unknown.
Blanket Bay massacre Smythe, whose deeds of violence were to assume notorious proportions among settlers, decided to retaliate and, on returning to Melbourne, organized an expedition to return to the Otways, picking up several
Wathaurong in
Geelong in August 1846. According to
Bruce Pascoe, he had been given a mandate by Latrobe simply to arrest the suspected culprit,
Meenee Meenee, a Gadubanud warrior, the only one whose name is known, with a reputation for vigorously defending territory from intruders. The party, which included several Wathaurung people, came across seven Gadubanud at the mouth of the
Aire River (whose estuary was known as
Gunuwarra (swan) in the Gadubanud language) near Glenaire and murdered them. A report of the massacre was published in
The Argus of 1 September 1846. From this time, nothing more is reported of the Gadubanud in colonial records, apart from a couple of newspaper articles that recalled the incident with some contradictory details. One such story is by
Aldo Massola who detailed the following account: 'In 1848 one of two survivors, a woman who then lived in Warrnambool, told the story: One of the white men had interfered with a
lubra, and her husband had killed the aggressor. The Black Police had come shortly after and had shot down indiscriminately the whole of her group, about twenty men, women and children. She and another lubra were only slightly wounded, and hid themselves in the scrub until the attackers left the scene of the massacre. As far as she knew they were the only survivors.' According to an article in
The Age (8 January 1887), Smythe attacked when the group was asleep, and managed to kill all of them, except for one young woman who had sought refuge behind a tree. She was, in this version, the only survivor, and was taken away, being later adopted into the
Woi wurrung tribe. Notwithstanding distortions in these reports, which fuse apparently distinct actions, it would appear that a second attack took place near the Aire River in the following year, 1847, when a detachment of
Native Police Corps, led by
Foster Fyans, slaughtered another group, while kidnapping two surviving children, a girl and a boy. The latter was later killed on a squatter's station by one of the "friendly natives" who had helped the raiding party, to prevent him from revenging the deaths on his maturity. In 1848, a report in the
Geelong Advertiser, commenting on a tribal fight that took place near
Port Fairy, describing one of the two Indigenous men killed as "a man who belonged to the Cape Otway tribe, the last of his race". By that time, the Otways were open to European settlement. William Roadknight, who had formerly mustered a posse to help Smythe in hunting the Gadubanud, cut a track through the valley of Wild Dog Creek and set up the first cattle station in the Otway peninsula. The destruction of the Gadubanud, who had practised
fire-stick farming to clear trails through the forests and bushland, restored the Otways to a state of wild regrowth that made travelling arduous, until the
great January 1851 bushfire ravaged much of the forest. ==Social structure, economy and customs==