No one knows how many Chinese men died on that deep winter day.
The 1857 Buckland riot as depicted by Thomas Lawler in 1987. Credit: Joe Armao
Authorities, keen to downplay the atrocity, later reported three deaths had occurred through “exposure, cold and previous illness”, though stories persisted of unknowable numbers of “Celestials” left to die in the forest, thrown down mine shafts or drowned in their desperation to escape.
A great line of injured Chinese staggered away from the Buckland-Porepunkah violence, heading for what they hoped might be safety at Beechworth.
Little compassion awaited them. A month later, newspapers reported crowds cheered in Beechworth’s streets when a jury returned not-guilty verdicts on the few white miners who were charged with riotous assembly and causing terror while armed.
More than a century later, in the early 1980s, with the riots a memory tucked away, a conman calling himself a pastor set up camp on a block on Back Porepunkah Road between the village and Bright, and proceeded to attract the weak, confused and lost into his scheme.
His name was Ronald J. Clarke. He presented himself as the only man capable of welcoming Jesus back to Earth and hinted that he could be Jesus himself.
The pyramidal central hall at 441 Back Porepunkah Road, once known as Christ’s Place of Restoration.
“Brother Ron” declared the creation of a new religion he called the Church of the First Born and set about organising his growing band of followers to build an opulent landing place for Jesus, which he named Christ’s Place of Restoration.
This reporter was working at the Albury Border Morning Mail at the time.
Desperate farmers and others in the district began contacting me with stories of Brother Ron using his oily charms and a claim of immortality to break up marriages, and pocketing substantial alimony payouts awarded in divorce proceedings.
Sensing cult activity, I paid the dodgy Ron a number of visits.
He initially tried to persuade me he was a genuine pastor building a colony of disciples far from the temptations of the big cities.
The “disciples”, however, were forbidden to speak to outsiders like me. Gaunt, as if half starved, and clearly afraid of Brother Ron, they toiled wordlessly on the block, clearing bush for gardens and constructing buildings without payment. The main “chapel” sat beneath a glass pyramid through which Jesus was supposed to descend.
Brother Ron soon became angry at my inquiries, threatening to sue if I kept writing about his outfit as a cult or repeating the claims of distraught informants that to exert control, he was deliberately starving family members lost to his silent sect.
Eventually, he declared I was banned from the premises of the Church of the First Born, and claimed he had informed the police that I was harassing him and his followers.
An advert for a talk by “pastor” Ronald Clarke in The Age of November 21, 1987.Credit: Age archive
I called the police, urging an investigation into Brother Ron’s fraudulent use of followers’ alimony payments and of his alleged mistreatment of adherents, including their children. The police sympathised, told me they were aware of the so-called pastor’s activities, but that they could do nothing. Church business seemed off-limits in those days.
In the end, Christ never turned up, the cult slowly disintegrated when Clarke’s followers finally figured he was an abuser rather than a saviour, and the bush reclaimed the gardens and the buildings, the whereabouts of the money extracted from the gullible forever unclear.
In the end, the conman pastor proved not to be immortal after all.
Driving past the front gate of the abandoned Christ’s Place of Restoration more than a decade ago, Brother Ron apparently suffered a heart attack, crashed into a tree and was killed.
The cult of Back Porepunkah Road was over.
All these years later, we learn of an alleged “sovereign citizen” living in a bus outside Porepunkah in the Buckland Valley below Mount Buffalo, where maddened miners once rioted.
And peaceful Porepunkah is swarming with police intent on finding the alleged killer of two of their colleagues.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.