Topics: Culture

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1845 - South Coastal - view

make a rug

1846 - North Coastal - view

NSW Legislative Council Select Committee takes evidence from Reverend John McKenny: “The numbers (of Aboriginal people) were greatly diminished … about 5 years ago by an epidemic said to be measles which carried off a great many”. There are many reported cases of white men living with Aboriginal women and having children.

1846 - North Coastal - view

The Reverend John Polding declares “I conceive that there is established in the minds of the black population a sentiment that the whites are essentially unjust … founded on the fact of the whites coming to take possession of their lands, without giving them what deemed an equivalent … to trespass upon the hunting grounds of another tribe is deemed by them a cause of war.”

1846 - South Coastal - view

collecting shells

1847 - North West - view

Darkinjung language

1847 - North Coastal - view

Reverend John Gregory states “that settlers believed the Aborigines were decreed by God to a position of innate inferiority from which the only escape was an inevitable extinction” . Threlkeld had a mission station near Lake Macquarie. He stated that the Aborigines had strayed from God’s path and as a result were doomed.

1847 - North West - view

Charlie Clark is one of the last to undergo traditional male initiation

1848 - North Coastal - view

Census shows a population of 50 Koori people in the whole of the Brisbane Waters area. Inland Aboriginal people continue through the 1850s to make annual pilgrimages to the coast.

1848 - North West - view

Bora Ground

1850 - North West - view

carves on a large flat mass of Hawkesbury sandstone the image of a white man going into the bush to cut timber carrying an axe over his shoulder

1850 - South West - view

‘Lilburndale’ where the Darug Sackville Reach burial ground is located

1852 - South Coastal - view

gathering shellfish

1853 - North West - view

A large Aboriginal ceremonial gathering is held at the “Bulga Bora Ground” on the eastern side of Wollombi Brook, with its sacred circles defined by small mounds of earth and carved trees bearing the emblems that mark the initiation of young men of the tribes to tribal rites. 500 to 600 Aboriginal people attend from various tribes from as far as Mudgee and Goulburn. White settlers are excluded from the Bora

1855 - West - view

locally made ground-edge axes

1855 - North West - view

throwing boomerangs at the old “Koala Park” paddocks

1860s - North Coastal - view

Traces of Christmas feasts have been found in the shell middens around the caves.

1861 - North West - view

Wollombi tribe is skilled at gathering wild honey and as a result of bartering with them

1866 - South Coastal - view

relates traditional stories about the country

1867 - Central - view

throw Boomerangs or spears

1867 - West - view

Darug language