Porepunkah, a peaceful village with a history of violence and cultists

Porepunkah, until this week, was recognised as little more than a peaceful village slumbering along the course of the Ovens River beneath the bulk of Mount Buffalo, just down the road from the ever-popular alpine town of Bright.

It is beloved of holidaymakers who come in the spring and summer for trout fishing, bushwalking, winery visits and river swimming, in autumn for the blazing colours of the turn of leaves and in winter for tobogganing on Mount Buffalo’s snow.

There is disbelief now in the Porepunkah district that a “sovereign citizen” camped just out of town could allegedly be responsible for shooting dead two policemen and wounding another.

What is largely forgotten these days is that the Porepunkah area has a long, dark history involving both terrible violence and bizarre cult activity.

On a chilled winter’s day of July 4, 1857, mobs of white supremacist gold miners set about destroying the camps and lives of 2000 Chinese diggers spread along the valley of the Buckland River, just outside present-day Porepunkah.

It was the most vicious race riot in Victoria’s history.

At the confluence of the Buckland and Ovens rivers, about two kilometres from what today is central Porepunkah, Chinese miners were viciously beaten and driven into the water, where an unknown number drowned.

Their new, ornately decorated joss house, the first Chinese temple in the area, was burnt to the ground.

At least 750 of the Chinese miners’ tents were torn down and incinerated, and 30 Chinese stores were robbed and burned.

No one knows how many Chinese men died on that deep winter day.

Authorities, keen to downplay the atrocity, later reported three deaths had occurred through “exposure, cold and previous illness”, though stories persisted of unknowable numbers of “Celestials” left to die in the forest, thrown down mine shafts or drowned in their desperation to escape.

A great line of injured Chinese staggered away from the Buckland-Porepunkah violence, heading for what they hoped might be safety at Beechworth.

Little compassion awaited them. A month later, newspapers reported crowds cheered in Beechworth’s streets when a jury returned not-guilty verdicts on the few white miners who were charged with riotous assembly and causing terror while armed.

More than a century later, in the early 1980s, with the riots a memory tucked away, a conman calling himself a pastor set up camp on a block on Back Porepunkah Road between the village and Bright, and proceeded to attract the weak, confused and lost into his scheme.

His name was Ronald J. Clarke. He presented himself as the only man capable of welcoming Jesus back to Earth and hinted that he could be Jesus himself.

“Brother Ron” declared the creation of a new religion he called the Church of the First Born and set about organising his growing band of followers to build an opulent landing place for Jesus, which he named Christ’s Place of Restoration.

This reporter was working at the Albury Border Morning Mail at the time.

Desperate farmers and others in the district began contacting me with stories of Brother Ron using his oily charms and a claim of immortality to break up marriages, and pocketing substantial alimony payouts awarded in divorce proceedings.

Sensing cult activity, I paid the dodgy Ron a number of visits. He initially tried to persuade me he was a genuine pastor building a colony of disciples far from the temptations of the big cities.

The “disciples”, however, were forbidden to speak to outsiders like me. Gaunt, as if half-starved, and clearly afraid of Brother Ron, they toiled wordlessly on the block, clearing bush for gardens and constructing buildings without payment. The main “chapel” sat beneath a glass pyramid through which Jesus was supposed to descend.

Brother Ron soon became angry at my inquiries, threatening to sue if I kept writing about his outfit as a cult or repeating the claims of distraught informants that, to exert control, he was deliberately starving family members lost to his silent sect.

Eventually, he declared I was banned from the premises of the Church of the First Born, and claimed he had informed the police that I was harassing him and his followers.

I called the police, urging an investigation into Brother Ron’s fraudulent use of followers’ alimony payments and of his alleged mistreatment of adherents, including their children. The police sympathised, told me they were aware of the so-called pastor’s activities, but that they could do nothing. Church business seemed off-limits in those days.

In the end, Christ never turned up, the cult slowly disintegrated when Clarke’s followers finally figured he was an abuser rather than a saviour, and the bush reclaimed the gardens and the buildings, the whereabouts of the money extracted from the gullible forever unclear.

The conman pastor proved not to be immortal after all.

Driving past the front gate of the abandoned Christ’s Place of Restoration more than a decade ago, Brother Ron apparently suffered a heart attack, crashed into a tree and was killed.

The cult of Back Porepunkah Road was over.

All these years later, we learn of a purported “sovereign citizen” living in a bus outside Porepunkah in the Buckland Valley below Mount Buffalo, where maddened miners once rioted.

And peaceful Porepunkah is swarming with police intent on finding the alleged killer of two of their colleagues.

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