Porteous's concern was not isolated. The same issue had been debated during the Aboriginal Protectorate period (1838-50), but reached its zenith during the gold rush. Trade in possum skin rugs, baskets and primary produce, and employment on pastoral stations after 1850 afforded Indigenous people a new degree of economic independence. Damaging social effects, in the form of alcohol abuse and absence of paternal control, were a concern reiterated many times by well-intentioned Correspondents and Guardians.⁶⁵ In his June 1871 report Porteous advocated a pass system, as he found the local Wathawurrung people could not be restricted and regulated sufficiently to keep them from their commercial activities in the towns:

The tribe still follow their occupations of fishing, hunting and making of opossum rugs, which they barter for stores, but often for grog. It is almost impossible to keep them from visiting the towns, and yet they have no business to transact in those towns except begging for grog and making themselves liable to be arrested under the Vagrant Act. They have no hunting field nor fishing river within these towns, and if they have anything to sell let them apply to the local guardian for a pass for that day, to be within a town to be named in that pass. Most of the tribe are old and feeble and unable to do any work. The young men are able and willing to work, and some of them can do work as well as any white man, but they are like many of the white men, and would spend every shilling they earn upon grog, if they can possibly get it done.⁶⁶

It was not only a degree of economic independence that the sale of possum rugs brought to the Aboriginal people of Victoria. Eugène von Guérard, a renowned artist on the Victorian goldfields, documented an inter-cultural transaction in 1854. His oil painting, Aborigines on the road to diggings or The barter, now in the Geelong Gallery, depicts Wathawurrung people offering possum rugs for sale to white miners on their way to the goldfields. What is of particular interest about von Guérard's painting is the centrality of the Wathawurrung men and women. Unlike many artists' depictions of Aboriginal people during the nineteenth century, in which they are peripheral players cast off to the background or figures relegated to the sidelines, von Guérard has focused the activity around confident Aboriginal salespeople who are clearly directing the business at hand. Moreover, the white 'consumer' desiring to purchase the possum rugs is painted in a subservient pose, kneeling down, whilst the Aboriginal 'manufacturer' assumes an upright, dominant demeanour. A number of commentators writing on Aboriginal society in the nineteenth century conceded that the Aboriginal people of Victoria possessed a good deal of business sense.

They barter with their neighbours; and it would seem that as regards the articles in which they deal, barter is as satisfactory to them as sale would be. They are astute in dealing with the whites, and it may be supposed they exercise reasonable forethought and care when bargaining with their neighbours.⁶⁷

Conclusion
This paper has uncovered a substantial body of evidence that clearly demonstrates that inter-cultural economic activity between white colonists and Aboriginal people in Victoria in the nineteenth century was widespread and that a greater degree of monetary trade existed than was previously thought. Accordingly, it can be argued that new paradigms are required in any discussion about the degree to which Aboriginal economies articulated with the colonial capitalist economy of the nineteenth century.

The implications of further research in this area are significant. If historians aim to include Aboriginal people in Australian history 'on terms of most perfect equality'⁶⁸ and to tell the same stories of wool and gold from broader perspectives, then it is necessary to re-appraise the historical sources and see that Indigenous Australians were not outside the landscape in the development of modern economic institutions. More research is needed to determine the extent to which Aboriginal people kept control of the money that passed through their hands, but the evidence thus far would suggest that they very quickly grasped the few economic initiatives available to them and exploited them skilfully - at least until the imposition of Missionary and Governmental controls, especially after the 1880s.

Notes
1. Charles Griffith, a pastoralist who took Wathawurrung land near present-day Ballan, recorded a glossary of Port Phillip, Corio, Weirabbee and Barrabul tribes' lexicon, which included 'flying squirrel: tooan, opussum: wollert, rug: dallong'. C Griffith, 'Diary', manuscript, State Library of Victoria, 1840-41.
2. CP Billot, John Batman and the founding of Melbourne, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1979, p. 118.
3. Cited in I McBryde, 'Exchange in south-eastern Australia: an ethnohistorical study', Aboriginal History, vol. 8, nos. 1-2, 1984, pp. 132-53, p. 151.
4. I McBryde, 'Where do the axes come from?', Mankind, vol. 1, no. 3, 1978, pp. 354-82; McBryde, 'Exchange in south-eastern Australia'. There exists excellent academic research on trading relationships in northern Australia, and the scope of this research has been significant. However, the parallels between that research and this paper are limited as the former focuses on a different geographic location and does not examine the processes by which locally manufactured (indigenous) goods were adopted by the dominant culture. For further discussion refer to I McNiven, 'Enmity and amity: reconsidering stone headed club (gabagaba) procurement and trade in Torres Strait', Oceania, vol. 69, no. 2, 1998, pp. 94-115 and D Russell, 'Aboriginal-Makassan interactions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in northern Australia and contemporary sea rights claims', Australian Aboriginal Studies, vol. 1, 2004, pp. 3-17.
5. McBryde, 'Exchange in south-eastern Australia', p. 151.
6. See I Clark, 'Nineteenth century capitalist expansion and the Aborigines of Western Victoria: a Marxist problematic', Working Paper, Department of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, 1989.