Topics: Culture: North Coastal

Macquarie gives the Russians freedom to investigate the local Koori conditions, social life and dealings with colonial officials. Those whom they see along the north side of the harbour are “extremely lean and quite black in colour … They subsist on a mixed diet of shell fish and fish, forest products, and exchange their fish for British goods. They hunt and the women fish or gather bush food, then they withdraw into the bush at night. They sleep by fires and never lack a fire, embers even burn in the noon day heat”. Mikhailov writes of Bungaree’s family “Sometimes they ornament their head with bird’s bones or fish bones, or the tail of a dog or kangaroo teeth; and sometimes they plait their hair, smearing it with gummy sap of a plant so that it resembles rope ends. They stain the face and body with red earth … When a youth reaches man’s estate [ie manhood], two of his front teeth are knocked out. As for the girls, in early youth they have two joints of the little finger of the left hand cut off”.   Since the men in Bungaree’s group were often absent from Kirribili, Mikhailov concentrated in his painting on the women and children. Volendens,Gulanba Duby, Gouroungan, Ga-ouen-ren, Matora. Male figures drawn are Boongaree, Bourinoan, Movat, Salmanda, Boin (Bowen) and Toubi (Toby).

The missionary LE Threlkeld publishes Aboriginal poetry from Lake Macquarie in the Sydney Gazette. ( Sydney Gazette , 5 January 1826) Immha, immah va Gnora worrayn na, gash, bah, yah, kummah, hi j (No translation)

Skulls from Aboriginal burials are taken as souvenirs.

He visits an Aboriginal camp near Camp Cove where “about a dozen natives of the Sydney and Broken Bay tribes were encamped”, and persuades ‘Old Queen Gooseberry’, Bungaree’s widow, to explain to him what she knew of the North Head carvings. She initially objects, saying that these places were ‘koradjee ground’ or ‘priests’ ground’ that she must not visit. After she was encouraged to row across the harbour with them in a whale boat, she “consented at the last to guide us to several spots near the North head, where she said the carvings existed in great numbers, as also impressions of hands upon the sides of high rocks”.

John F Mann an early settler on the Central coast, records that ‘Tuggerah’ in Aboriginal language means ‘cold, bleak, exposed’.

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.”

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.

Corroborees held at Manly on the site of several churches above Careening Cove. During the visit of Albert Prince of Wales, the Koori visitors come from different Guringai, Darkinyung and Garigal areas to dance a large corroboree. They camp at ‘Fassifern’ a property belonging to the Loxton family, on a flat piece of ground between Kurraba Rd Bridge and Aubin St near a waterfall, at rear of Dalmarnock cottage. They camp every year to receive annual blanket and rations for Queen’s birthday. LF Mann writes, “I well remember watching a number of the original inhabitants of this country camping and practising for this great event, making boomerangs from local trees and using them, as they danced around, their bodies painted in many designs.”

Mrs Janet Kennedy (nee Williams) recalls “that the Manly district contained a number of Aboriginal camps”. (Kennedy 1937) The people were living on a mixture of British food (especially tea, flour and sugar) and bush tucker.