PORTLAND, VIC TRAVEL
On 10 May 1861, Portlanders of distinction gathered at the Tasmanian Hotel to insist that a colony, to be called Princeland, be established as a separate state to Victoria and South Australia.
When the border between South Australia and Victoria (then part of NSW) was established in 1834, the only people who knew about and travelled within the interior of the region were First Nations clans.
So, the new border, drawn in the Colonial Office for the 1834 Act of Parliament by which South Australia was established, was created in the absence of European knowledge of that part of Australia.
This increasingly became a matter of indignation to Portland's growing settler population, and by the 1860s the succession movement flourished.
Princeland was to have five ports — Robe, Port Macdonnell, Portland, Port Fairy and Warrnambool — and extend north as far as the Murray River. It would be about the same size as Tasmania.
Members of the Separation League in the isolated south-west wanted to self-govern, far from what they termed the ‘money-pit’ state capitals of Adelaide (537km north-west) and Melbourne (350km east), from which they argued Portland, tucked away in Victoria's south-west corner, received very little.
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