The Victoria River District Doomsday Book
Authors: Lewis Darrell 
Published: December 2022

As I described in the first edition of the Victoria River District Doomsday Book, it has its genesis in Jock Makin’s history of Victoria River Downs, The Big Run. In early editions of this book Makin had a list of Victoria River Downs managers and the years they were in charge of VRD. In 1981 Deborah Rose and I were recording Aboriginal oral history in the Victoria River country and often found it difficult to place the stories in time. Aboriginal oral historians were not concerned to note the year when an event happened, but usually could say who the station manager was at the time. If it was known when that manager was in charge of the station the Aboriginal stories could be placed in a reasonable time frame. Because of this, from archival records and by talking with older cattle station people I began to compile lists like Makin’s for every station in the district. As this work progressed I kept coming across interesting facts about many of the station managers and other station employees, and I began to add this information to my lists. The biographical information kept growing to the point where I began to deliberately try to compile short biographies of as many of the managers as possible, and to include interesting facts and stories about events on the stations themselves. As the Book grew I regularly lent copies to former residents of the district and asked them to add new information and to highlight any details they thought were incorrect. This led to a great deal of information not available in the written record (or not yet found) being preserved for posterity. Of course, it’s not unusual for one person to remember events, dates or people differently from another person. Unless there was a majority view, or written records or photos strongly supported one version over another, I usually included both versions. In this way the Victoria River District Doomsday Book gradually took on a life of its own and the result, after 40 years, is the document reproduced here.Why call it a Doomsday Book? In 1085 William the Conqueror ordered a great survey be carried out over much of England and parts of Wales. The survey recorded the names of all the landholders and estimated the value of their manor house and out-buildings, their land, livestock and plough teams. It listed the river-meadows, woodland, pasture and any other sources of revenue each landholder owned. It also listed the ‘several classes’ of peasants on each estate. The survey was done for taxation purposes and there was no appeal against any valuation made. In the following century the name ‘Domesday Book’ came into use because the valuations decreed by the King were unalterable, just as, people at the time believed, God’s rulings would be unalterable on Judgment Day. And, of course, the title grabs attention doesn’t it? As a matter of interest, there is at least one other Doomsday Book. This is the so-called Kentucky Doomsday Book, a document created in 1779-80 by United States government officials appointed to hear settler’s claims in the Kentucky District under Virginia Land Law A. This is not yet available online, but see https://www.jstor.org/stable/23369460 for a summary of how it came into existence and its general contents.