
Bennelong & Boongaree

Bennelong (?1764-1813)
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Introduction – Bennelong and Boongaree
Sadly we have no direct Aboriginal account of early European settlement; no first-hand impressions and reactions to the clothed white people, their boats and customs. Without a written language all first-hand memories, observations, and personal recollections are lost to us, only being handed down to us by word of mouth, certainly unreliable in the hands of Europeans if not those of Aborigines themselves. We cannot know, only speculate, and glean what we can from orally transmitted narratives.
While the 10,000 year history of western civilization is available to study and enjoy in great detail, the 65,000 year history of Australia’s First People is practically non-existent.
Oral history
In 2020 the National Museum partnered with the ABC in an ABC Iview series featuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people sharing the original names of the places Captain Cook renamed on his voyage of the east coast. Vanessa Milton[7] recorded, for ABC SE NSW, an interview with Warren Foster, a Djiringanj Yuin traditional knowledge holder, concerning the likely reaction of the Yuin people of south-eastern Australia to the first sighting of James Cook‘s Endeavour, and commentary has come from other sources.[8][9]
On April 19, 1770, the crew of Endeavour sighted the Australian coast at Tolywiarar — now known as Point Hicks in Victoria’s East Gippsland. The following day, they rounded the south-eastern tip of the Australian mainland and sailed into Yuin country. “Our old people, they saw him and they handed stories down,” Warren Foster said describing how, to his ancestors, Endeavour swimming on the ocean with its large white sails, resembled Gurung-gubba the pelican. “Now the story of Gurung-gubba, he’s a real greedy fella,” Mr Foster said,”When you’re fishing he’ll come and steal your fish. So, you had to watch him and “. . . just the same as us watching him when we’re fishing, we had to keep an eye out on that boat.” As Endeavour sailed past, the Yuin people lit fires on headlands to warn others further up the coast. “On all them points, you only had fires there in ceremony time,” Mr Foster said. “So when people saw the smoke burning, they were curious. “And when they went and had a look they saw this white boat sailing.”
On April 21, Cook wrote in his journal: “In the p.m. we saw the smoke of fire in several places; a certain sign that the country is inhabited.” Over the following days as Endeavour progressed northward toward Gamay, known today as Botany Bay, Cook frequently noted in his journal the sight of smoke along the shore after dark. “Them old people knew that there was something strange about this boat” Mr Foster said, “And eventually, this pelican would sail in, and he did eventually scoop up everything and steal everything off us.”
The same day Cook first saw smoke on the shore, Endeavor sailed past Gulaga, the Yuin people’s sacred mother mountain on the far-south coast of New South Wales. Cook’s journal records “At 6 we were abreast of a pretty high mountain laying near the shore which, on account of its figure, I named Mount Dromedary.” The Yuin people see a woman lying down when they look at Gulaga. James Cook saw a camel.
“Gulaga is as sacred to us as Uluru is to the Mutitjulu mob out in the desert,” Mr Foster said.
“She gave birth to all the Yuin people. “To name her after a camel is an insult to our people.”
The Yuin people were heavily impacted by the arrival of European settlers. More than a century after Cook first surveyed the coast, an Aboriginal reserve was established at the foot of Gulaga at Wallaga Lake. Aboriginal people from across southern NSW and Victoria were moved onto the reserve where their lives were tightly controlled. Traditional languages and cultural practices were forbidden and generations of families lived with the threat of removal of their children. The reserve was abolished after the 1967 referendum and in 1983, after decades of activism, the local Aboriginal community gained ownership of the land. The former reserve became the Wallaga Lake Koori Village — where Mr Foster has lived for most of his life.
Milton records that while cultural knowledge has been lost over two centuries of dispossession, dislocation and control, a lot of knowledge has been maintained. “Our old people knew the importance of keeping culture,” said Mr Foster “Even if that meant being quiet about it — [being] secretive — so that other people didn’t see it. “Even our own people, it was hidden from them, because they had to find the ones who were trustworthy to keep it, and keep it going. “I feel privileged and grateful that our old people preserved our culture, and kept ceremony going.” Mr Foster’s deep connection to the sacred mother mountain remains unbroken. “We look at Gulaga for guidance and strength” . . . “It helps us spiritually knowing that she’s always there and we live at the foot of her. “And when we travel up and down the coast it’s the first thing we look for to know we’re home.”
In 2006, Gulaga was handed back to its traditional owners in a joint management agreement with the NSW Government. She is known, once again, by her true name.
Though not directly related to the core topics of this web site I thought it would be of interest to include just one piece outlining – albeit from a distinctly European perspective – the lives of two Aboriginals from these early times: that of Bennelong, who spent time in England, is especially poignant as he clearly struggled with loyalties and the cultural divide before deciding to return to his own people.
Aboriginals though often treated with disdain were nevertheless respected as trackers, collectors, guides, interpreters, and go-betweens. For these reasons they soon became essential members of expeditions both on land and sea although their important role in early exploration has been largely unacknowledged. Europeans taking an interest in their culture, language, and extensive knowledge of the Australian environment were few. Today the synthesis of past knowledge has been the dedicated task of people like Philip Clarke (see references below).
These accounts of Bennelong and Boongaree are drawn largely from material available in greater detail in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Philip Clarke’s Aboriginal Plant Collectors. They are included here to at least give a vague impression of interpersonal relationships in these times. The very few European accounts of individual Aboriginals is, in itself, a sad record. The apparent assumption that Aboriginals would be greatly honoured by introduction to the English king, along with polite English society and its entertainments seems, from today, to have been a gross miscalculation and lack of insight.
Boongaree (Bungaree)
Boongaree (Bungaree) (? 1765-1830) a leader of the Guringai people lived in the Broken Bay area north of Sydney and was used as a guide and interpreter by Flinders on a trip in the Norfolk to the Hervey Bay area north of Brisbane in 1799 and then during his circumnavigation of the continent from 1801 to 1803 when Flinders was accompanied by Robert Brown and Peter Good.
Also on this trip was Aboriginal Nanbaree. Nursed from smallpox when six or seven Nanbaree had learned English very quickly and was valuable as an interpreter: he lived with the family of surgeon-naturalist of the First Fleet John White and when he died in 1821 was buried in the same grave as Bennelong at Kissing Point (Ryde).[2]
On both trips Boongaree served as an effective negotiator with the local people, managing to forestall any potential for conflict. Returning to Sydney in 1815 Macquarie set up 15 members of Bungaree’s tribe with a farm at George’s Head which included huts, implements, livestock and convict instructors then, at a feast, decorated him with a brass plate inscribed “Boongaree chief of the Broken-Bay-Tribe 1815”. Breastplates like this were often inaccurate and could be used in ridicule; Boonagaree’s wife Matora, for example, was known as ‘Queen Gooseberry’.[3] The invitation by Macquarie to take up a civilized white lifestyle was not taken up.[1]
In 1817 Boongaree joined Lt Phillip Parker King expedition to the ?north-west coast in the Mermaid charting those parts of the coast that had not been covered by Flinders but also with botanist-explorer Allan Cunningham on board. King described Boongaree as sharp, intelligent and unassuming.
However, he had been given a discarded British uniform with a cocked hat and to everyone’s amusement impersonated the mannerisms of local personalities including Governors Hunter to Brisbane, making a rather pathetic figure entertaining the settlers and begging for money, cash, drink and tobacco.[1]
When Russian explorer Capt Thaddeus Bellinghausen visited Sydney on a trip to Antarctica where he was befriended by Boongaree. Bellinghausen was joined Cunningham on a botanical collecting trip across the Blue Mountains.
Mention should be made of Pemulway (probably a member of the Bidjigal clan of the Eora people, the original inhabitants of Toongabbie and Parramatta in Sydney) who resisted European settlement of Australia from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. In November 1801 Govr Gidley-King, after numerous confrontations, ordered that he be brought in dead or alive. On 2 June 1802 Pemulwuy was shot and killed, his head was preserved in spirits and sent to Joseph Banks in England as a trophy.
Bennelong & Yemmerramanee
An elder of the Eora people in Port Jackson, Bennelong (?1764-1813) was one of two Aboriginals to first experience life in Europe. On Governor Phillip’s orders he was captured and brought to Sydney Cove so that Phillip could gain some insight into native customs and language. When captured he was described as ‘of good stature, stoutly made‘, with a ‘bold, intrepid countenance‘ and accounts of him say he was courageous, intelligent, vain, quick-tempered, ‘tender with children’ and something of a comedian, entertaining the English with his undignified antics.
Bennelong lived for a while in the Governor’s house enjoying the food and white hospitality, and learning English, but he escaped in May and was not seen again until September when he was noticed in a gathering of natives at Manly. Here Governor Phillip, called to the site, was speared as the result of a misunderstanding. Bennelong, concerned for the Governor, often came to Sydney Cove to enquire after his health and when convinced that he would not be recaptured and punished would return to the settlement with friends, meeting in the Government House yard.
A small brick hut was built for him in 1791 on the eastern point of Sydney Cove (now called Bennelong Point).
Acompanying Bennelong on HMS Atlantic when it left New South Wales for England on 11 December 1792 was a young companion Yemmerramanee who had ‘voluntarily and cheerfully‘ joined his close friend Bennelong and Governor Phillip on the voyage. He was described by Captain Watkin Tench as ‘a slender fine looking youth … about sixteen years old‘ who had been given clothes and trained as a waiter to the Governor’s table.[5] Together they were the first Aborigines to see England. On arrival the periodicals London Packet and New Lloyd’s Evening Post stated that the natives of Port Jackson appeared ‘totally incapable of civilization‘ and ‘… form a lower order of the human race‘. Clothes were quickly made as the pair were to be presented to King George III at St James Palace – including waistcoats, breeches, ruffled shirts, frock coats with plated buttons, and buckled shoes appropriate for polite society. They were entertained colonial-style by being taken in horse and carriage to experience the sigts and sounds of London, including the Tower, St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as trips to the theatre including Sadler’s Wells.[6] Both were now becoming homesick and dejected, Yemmerramanee especially was emaciated and seven months later on 18 May 1794 succumbed to pneumonia and was buried at Eltham Parish Church in Kent, buried as a Christian among the graves of local residents, the gravestone subsequently moved to the perimeter wall.[6]
Bennelong sailed back to the colony in 1795 with Governor John Hunter who notes that Bennelong had caught a cold and that a deep homesickness, combined with the long delay before departure, had ‘… much broken his spirit‘.
On return to Sydney on 7 September 1795 Bennelong found it difficult to settle with either the English or his own people and was frequently drunk and violent, being seriously wounded in 1798 during one of many tribal confrontations. He had two wives, the second finding another partner while he was away in England. The Sydney Gazette unsympathetically recording his death at Kissing Point on 3 January 1813 saying ‘Of this veteran champion of the native tribe little favourable can be said. His voyage to and benevolent treatment in Great Britain produced no change whatever in his manners and inclinations, which were naturally barbarous and ferocious‘ he was an ‘… irreconcilable savage… ‘[1][5]

View from the western side of Sydney Cove (Circular Quay) looking to Bennelong Point and Fort Macquarie c. 1841
Hand-coloured lithograph by Adolphe Jean-Baptiste Bayot (1810–1866) after Romuald Georges Menard
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons – http://www.antiqueprintroom.com/ – Accessed 16-July-2020

Bennelong Point, known to the local Gadigal people of the Eora nation as Tubowgule, is a former island in Sydney Harbour
This is now a headland that, since the 1970s, has been the location of the Sydney Opera House, Australia.
Bennelong Island consisted of rocks with a small beach on the western side and located on the tip of the eastern arm of Sydney Cove that was separated from the mainland at high tide. For a brief period in 1788 cattle and horses – brought with the First Fleet to Port Jackson (Sydney’s natural harbour) from Cape Town by Governor Arthur Phillip – was called Cattle Point. The Area had been an Aboriginal midden with a deep layer of discarded oyster shells gathered over many years by aboriginal women. Gatyered by convict women they were burned to make lime for cement mortar, hence another name, Limeburners’ Point. The shells furnished just enough lime for the construction of the two-storey government house.
In the early 1790s, the Aboriginal man Bennelong— employed as a cultural interlocutor by the British—persuaded New South Wales Governor Phillip to build a brick hut for him on the point which changed its name once more. In December 1798, a half-moon battery was constructed at the extreme northern end of the Point, mounted with guns from HMS Supply. In the period from 1818 to 1821, the tidal area between Bennelong Island and the mainland was filled with rocks excavated from the Bennelong Point peninsula. The entire area was leveled to create a low platform and to provide suitable stone for the construction of Fort Macquarie. While the fort was being built, a large portion of the rocky escarpment at Bennelong Point was also cut away to allow a road to be built around the point from Sydney Cove to Farm Cove. This was known as Tarpeian Way.
The existence of the original tidal island and its rubble fill were largely forgotten until the late 1950s when both were rediscovered during the excavations related to the construction of the Sydney Opera House. Prior to the Opera House’s construction, Bennelong Point had housed Fort Macquarie Tram Depot. This account of Benneleong point is adapted from that in Wikipedia.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons – Bkamprath Accessed 16-July-2020
First published on the internet – 1 March 2019
Bennelong Point in 1841

Bennelong Point, Fort Macquarie & the first Sydney Rowing Club shed 1880
Davis Sporting Collection, Mitchell John Corbett Davis
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

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