The traditional owners are Indigenous Australians of the Gunai nation and in part of West Gippsland the Bunurong nation. Before permanent European colonisation, the area was visited by sealers and wattle bark gatherers who did not settle. Samuel Anderson, a Scottish immigrant from Kirkcudbright, agriculturist and explorer, arrived in Hobart, Tasmania in 1830, and in 1835 established a squatter agricultural settlement on the Bass River in Gippsland, the third permanent colonial settlement in Victoria. His business partner Robert Massie joined him in 1837. Both had worked for the Van Diemen's Land Company at Circular Head, Tasmania. Samuel's brothers Hugh and Thomas arrived at Bass shortly after, where they established a successful farming venture. Further European colonisation followed two separate expeditions to the area. During his expedition to the South in March 1840, Polish explorer Paweł Edmund Strzelecki led an expedition across Gunai country, and gave his own names to many of their natural landmarks and places. Following these expeditions, the name "Gippsland" stuck, a name chosen by Strzelecki in honour of the New South Wales Governor, George Gipps, his sponsor. See also Angus McMillan led the second European expedition between 1840, naming Gunai country "Caledonia Australis". The naming of this geographical region, however, remained the name given by P. E. Strzelecki - Gippsland The township of Bass was surveyed and colonised in the early 1860s. The intensive colonisation of south Gippsland began late in the 1870s. A story of that process is told in, The land of the Lyre Bird.
Geography
Gippsland is traditionally subdivided into four or five main subregions or districts:
The climate of Gippsland is temperate and generally humid, except in the central region around Sale, where annual rainfall averages around. In the Strzelecki Ranges annual rainfall can be as high as, while on the high mountains of East Gippsland it probably reaches similar levels – much of it falling as snow. In lower levels east of the Snowy River, mean annual rainfall is typically about and less variable than in the coastal districts of New South Wales. Mean maximum temperatures in lower areas range from in January to in July. In the highlands of the Baw Baw Plateau and the remote Errinundra Plateau, temperatures range from a maximum of to a minimum of. However, in winter, mean minima in these areas can be as low as, leading to heavy snowfalls that often isolate the Errinundra Plateau between June and October.
Natural resources
The soils in Gippsland are generally very infertile, being profoundly deficient in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium. Apart from frequently flooded areas, they are classed as Spodosols, Psamments and Ultisols. Consequently, heavy fertilisation is required for agriculture or pastoral development. Despite this, parts of Gippsland have become highly productive dairying and vegetable-growing regions: the region supplies Melbourne with most of its needs in these commodities. A few alluvial soils have much better native fertility, and these have always been intensively cultivated. In the extreme northeast is a small section of the Monaro Tableland used for grazing beef cattle. Gippsland possesses very few deposits of metallic minerals. However, the deep undergroundgold mines operated at Walhalla for a fifty-year period between 1863–1913. Gippsland has no deposits of major industrial nonmetallic minerals, but it does feature the world's largest brown coal deposits and, around Sale and offshore in the Bass Strait, some of the largest deposits of oil and natural gas in Australia. Like the rest of Australia, the seas around Gippsland are of very low productivity as there is no upwelling due to the warm currents in the Tasman Sea. Nonetheless, towns such as Marlo and Mallacoota depended for a long time on the fishing of abalone, whose shells could fetch very high prices because of their use for pearls and pearl inlays.
