Why did Billibellary and Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung clansfolk parley with the coloniser John Batman on the banks of the Merri Creek in June 1835? And what befell the clans in the decade and a half that followed? Based on the daily journal of Assistant Protector William Thomas, this work meticulously documents the lives and deaths of those who struggled to hold their Country as the nascent colonial administration unleashed 'the terror of British law' on them. Thomas, both a defender of Kulin rights and an agent of empire, witnessed the devastation of the Kulin, recording their heartbreak and defi ance as they succumbed to dispossession, domination, disease and hunger. Banbu-deen: The Years of Terror is a new history of colonisation at Port Phillip.