Historic accounts of the long walk from ‘Mohican’ Aboriginal Station in the Upper Goulburn to ‘Coranderrk’ Aboriginal Station in the Yarra Valley have placed more emphasis on the experience of Aboriginal people at their destination, rather than concentrating upon circumstances at their point of departure. This paper considers how spatial politics has influenced the orientation of Aboriginal history by examining the conditions that prompted the acquisition and later abandonment of the ‘Mohican’ Aboriginal Station. Members of the Kulin nations first made a deliberate claim for culturally significant land that could also be used for agriculture at ‘Acheron’ in the Upper Goulburn Valley, in 1859. Their selection of the Acheron site was immediately contested by squatters, who mobilised an ‘elaborate machinery of deception’ to achieve the relocation of the Aboriginal settlement to the nearby Mohican run. These influential squatters, I argue, undermined and eventually preclude the threat of an Aboriginal settlement in the upper Goulburn district by using the mechanisms developed to counter the impact of the colony’s first major land selection act.