1940s

Gandangara descendant Bill Harvie relates that as a child he was told by his uncle, when he saw a water dragon, that it was a Gurangatch. Smith, ‘Gundungurra Country’, PhD thesis, p. 153.

Jimmy Shepherd dies. Smith, ‘Gundungurra Country’, PhD thesis, p. 303

In the 1990s, Auntie Gloria Ardler recalls her great grandmother, Mary Longbottom: “My mother travelled a lot with her mother before they came to live at La Perouse old mission. They’d come from the Burragorang Valley to The Oaks and to Picton to catch the steam train to Wollongong. They went further south to Nowra and over to Coolangatta Mountain where other Aboriginal people lived. Most of the homes would be made from bark and hessian rugs. She recalled, ‘My grandmother, and her mother, knew how to speak in the Aboriginal language. I remember listening to my grandmother talking to some of the old people at La Perouse. They would all get together at her house on the mission. She and some of the others would smoke their clay pipes. So her sister and Gran’s own mother liked to chew the old tobacco.” Johnson, Sacred Waters, p. 51.