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    Letter to Town Clerk from A Thornton, 22 August 1844, courtesy of Public Record Office Victoria, Victorian Archives Centre.
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    Letter to Town Clerk from James Clow, 22 August 1844, courtesy of Public Record Office Victoria, Victorian Archives Centre.
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    Letter to Town Clerk from W Scholfield, 22 August 1844, courtesy of Public Record Office Victoria, Victorian Archives Centre.
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Religion

The Aboriginal people living in the area now known as Melbourne believed that human occupation was owed to an act of creation by Bunjil, who not only shaped the land and made it fruitful, but equipped men with spears and women with digging sticks, showed them how to collect food and laid down the laws governing their social behaviour. European interlopers brought their own religion. On the displacement of the indigenous people, the representatives of the various churches had little to say, at least until much nearer to our own times. Probably the only generalisation one can make about religion in modern Melbourne is its diversity, measured by the number of different faiths and by the representation of a variety of traditions. Since the 1970s the public face of Melbourne's religion has changed dramatically as the result of immigration from Asia and the Middle East: for the first time since the mid-19th century there have been communities outside the Judaistic-Christian tradition.