The warfare that went on in the Western District in Victoria is partially documented in the diary of Annie Baxter¹. In 1843 she travelled overland from Port Macquarie to 'Yambuck', a small squatting property sixteen kilometres west of Port Fairy. In 1842 the Europeans of the area had petitioned Governor LaTrobe, asking for protection from the Gunditjmara whose 'numbers[,]... ferocity and... cunning render them particularly formidable'.² Guerilla warfare in the Western District of Victoria was at its height in the early- to mid-1840s, and when Annie Baxter moved to 'Yambuck' she recorded harassment and violence in her diary every month from April 1845 to May 1847. The forms of resistance employed by Koories included attacks on the economic base of farms by stampeding or 'rushing' livestock, stealing potatoes and other staple foods, and ransacking huts at out-stations, as well as such tactics of intimidation as occasionally killing farm workers and loitering around houses at night. In a two-month period in 1843 in the Port Fairy district, for example, four shepherds were killed and seven white men were wounded, approximately 2 000 sheep were stolen and rushed, over 100 cattle were killed and three stations were attacked.³ The reprisals for this type of resistance could be bloody, and when the local clan eluded the European 'hunting parties' and physical retaliation could not be accomplished, settlers burned any tools, weapons and rugs they could find knowing that the pressure on resources was such that replacing the utensils of everyday life was increasingly difficult for clans.⁴ In a chilling entry, Annie recorded her own participation in one of these raids:

This morning we sallied forth in the quest of the Blacks. Even I looked a formidable person with my red shirt and black belt - in the latter was a pouch with... cartridges &c. - and my constant companion - my pistol. Tom had a double barrelled gun, pistols in a belt, sword by his side, surmounted by a green oilskin hat, large coat and leggings.... (4 June 1846) 

Upon finding the camp, the party discovered only women and children, and they 'commanded the work of destruction; such burning of mina-minas and killing of campfires', and the breaking of spears and bottles.

Another aspect of race relations and frontier life illustrated in Annie Baxter's diary was the sexual encounters between white men and Koorie women. When, in 1840, Annie discovered the relationship between her husband, Andrew, and an indigenous woman, she threatened to cut him off from her substantial independent income unless he ended the affair, and banished him from her bed. It was also to be this aspect of European-Aboriginal relations that would cause Annie's attitudes towards the Gunditjmara to change dramatically.

Within twelve months of the retaliatory expedition noted above Annie Baxter began to express the ambiguities associated with her position as both white, and hence part of the ruling group, and as a woman, and hence subordinated within her own culture. Her primary relationship with the Gunditjmara was one of hostility springing from the competition for land and resources. However, across the Shaw River, opposite her home, there was a Gunditjmara camp. In the camp was a woman who had contracted venereal disease and had been abandoned by her community, and Annie nursed her. The Koorie ostracism, if such it was, would most likely not have been in response to a perceived sexual transgression, but to disease being seen as the result of a transgression of sacred laws. The woman died in Annie's care and Annie wrote at length in her journal, giving us an horrifically close view of the results of so many liaisons between white men and Koorie women: 

Men (and I mean white men) in this instance as in many more, has been only the means of making this poor woman's condition worse than it originally was; all she knew of him was to bring her to that fearful state in which she suffered and eventually died. She was originally, they tell me, very stout and good looking - enough so to attract the attention of shepherds at Mr Ritchie's station. Her unfortunate step was falling into her shocking state of disease, thro' which she lost her palate, and became unable to speak above a whisper; her former lovers then had the brutality to then put her into a tub of sublimate, used for sheep dressing, after which she fell into a rapid decline and but for me would have starved! Which will God judge, the civilised enlightened Christians or the unfortunate and ignorant Heathen? I have entered into this too fully but it has cost me a tear, and at this moment my eyes are full! For White or Black, in sickness and in health - we are sisters in God! (16 May 1847) 

Annie Baxter's diary expresses the complexity of her position as a member of a powerful colonising group who punished the Gunditjmara for 'economic' resistance or attacks, but also her ability as a woman to sympathise with and respond in a compassionate manner to a victim of sexual violence, the results of which were so clear to her.

The diaries of Annie Baxter and others are records of some of the mechanics of dispossession. White women in this early colonial society were not only wives or missionaries, but also farmers who were in competition with Koories for land and resources and who sometimes participated in that dispossession.