Seahorse Inn, NSW Sapphire Coast: A beautiful place with a horrible history

Well before the infamous shonks of the 1980s business world, colonial Australia fell under the spell of a wealthy and charismatic fraudster named Benjamin Boyd. Labelled an "entrepreneur" by the Australian Dictionary of Biography, this 45-year-old Scotsman arrived in Sydney to great fanfare in 1842 with a fleet of ships and a self-initiated bank providing bottomless credit, resulting in a staggering land-grab throughout southern Australia.

The jewel in his 1540-square kilometre squattocracy was a settlement on the shores of Twofold Bay, just shy of the whaling port of Eden on the NSW Sapphire Coast. Naming the town in his own inflated honour, Boyd envisaged Boydtown as the future capital of Australia, with the elegant Seahorse Inn the centrepiece of both the township and social life between Sydney and Melbourne.

There's no denying the vision behind Boyd's grandiose scheme; but like many of his vanity projects, construction of the sandstone inn soon stalled. Then, after exhausting supplies of convict and Aboriginal labour for both his pastoral and whaling enterprises, Boyd turned to "blackbirding" - kidnapping Pacific Islanders as an underpaid and abused workforce. In other words, Benjamin Boyd was Australia's first slave trader – a practice deemed both illegal and anathema amongst polite society, even in those less enlightened times.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, there have been recent rumblings proposing that both Boydtown, and more specifically, the surrounding Ben Boyd National Park – so-named back in 1971 – be stripped of their names, with local Yuin leaders hoping to replace them with more appropriate Indigenous monikers.

"I find it insulting it's been named Ben Boyd – national parks are, amongst other things, for the preservation of Aboriginal cultural heritage," BJ Cruse, chairman of the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council and a traditional owner of the region, says. "We believe it's a slap in the face for Aboriginal people to have a national park named after a slave driver. Ben Boyd regarded Aboriginal people as vermin – we don't believe he should have the honour."

To address concerns, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service has engaged the services of an historian to evaluate Boyd's place in 19th century history, and to make recommendations. Meanwhile, Boydtown's owner, property developers Lyon Group Australia, is also examining the legal implications of a potential name change.

"The owners of the Seahorse Inn talked to myself and the traditional owners, and they have said they are going through the process to change the name," Mr Cruse says. "The last meeting I had with them was dealing with the Geographic Names Board, because there's a legal process they have to follow with a name change."