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Gandangara
Aboriginal people in New South Wales, Australia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Gandangara people, also spelled Gundungara, Gandangarra, Gundungurra and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people in south-eastern New South Wales, Australia. Their traditional lands include present day Goulburn, Wollondilly Shire, The Blue Mountains and the Southern Highlands.
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Name
The ethnonym Gundangara combines lexical elements signifying both "east" and "west".[1]
Language
The first attempt at a brief description of the Gundangara language was undertaken by R. H. Mathews in 1901.[2] The language is classified as a subset of the Yuin-Kuric branch of the Pama-Nyungan language family, and is very close to Ngunnawal.[3]
Country
The Gandangara lived throughout an area covering an estimated 11,000 square kilometres (4,100 sq mi) in the south-east region of New South Wales. According to Norman Tindale, their lands encompassed Goulburn and Berrima, running down the Nepean River (Wollondilly) until the vicinity of Camden.[1] This includes the catchments of the Wollondilly and Coxs rivers, and some territory west of the Great Dividing Range. It also encompasses large parts of the Blue Mountains including Katoomba and the Megalong Valley.[4] The AIATSIS map shows their country as extending to the south, well beyond Goulburn, to the northern and eastern shorelines of Lake George, and bordering country of the Ngunawal and Yuin[5]
Their neighbours are the Dharug and the Eora to their north,[6] Darkinung, Wiradjuri, Ngunawal and Thurrawal, (eastwards)[6] peoples.[4]
Social organisation
The Gandangara were formed into a variety of interconnected groups or clans, among which were:
History
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Contact with Europeans
In 1802, the explorer Francis Barrallier met the Gundungara people as his party moved through "The Cowpastures" southwest of Sydney, crossing the Nattai to the Wollondilly River and up to the heights above where Yerranderie now stands. Barrallier became acquainted with a Gundungara leader named Goondel and noted in his journal that the Gundungara "themselves build huts for the strangers they wish to receive as friends."[8] Most of their land was initially not appetizing for early settlers, given the poor quality of the Nepean sandstone soils, and in a bid to stop encroachments they are said to have petitioned Governor King successfully in order to secure protected access to their riverine yam beds. This promise was maintained until King's departure in 1807.[9]
In 1811 Governor Macquarie started handing out numerous "land grants" to settlers in the Darawal area around Appin, one as large as 400 hectares (1,000 acres) given to William Broughton.[10]
War with the British
In March 1814, some Aborigines were violently driven away after they complained of not being paid their wages for working for white settlers.[9] In May an Aboriginal woman and three children were killed during skirmishes near the Milehouse and Butcher farms, and in retaliation, 3 Europeans were killed. Though this was on traditional Darawal lands, these fatal incidents, like a further one at Bringelly in June, were attributed to the Gandangara coming over from the west. The Gandangara joined forces with the Thurrawal/Darawal, who had linked up with remnants of the Dharug, in order to participate in the frontier war, also raiding cornfields. The decline in Dharug population had opened up parts of their territory to use by neighbouring tribal groups, which also fought among themselves.
Aside from considerations of defending their territories against the European colonial expansion, a period of severe drought may have influenced this turn in strategy. Gandangara raiding bands, harvesting crops on settlers' properties,[11] also attacked the Thurrawal and Dharug, so that the latter two began to collaborate against them, by helping the British authorities, and seeking refuge in squatters' settlements.[12] Like other tribes, the Gandangara had developed strategies to cope with the superior firepower of musketry, teasing troops to fire at them, in the knowledge that, once fired, some time was required to reload them, during which the aborigines could launch spearing attacks.[13]
Appin massacre
In 1816, seven settlers were killed, four on the Nepean and three at Macquarie's wife's property at Camden, when the Gandangara came out of the hills in search of food. Macquarie ordered the 46th Regiment, under Captain James Wallis, to round up all Aborigines from the Hawkesbury down to these southern areas.[11] Those punitive expeditions aimed to strike terror into anyone surviving them.[13] Wallis often found settlers unwilling to hand over the Darawal people who lived on their stations but, eventually, executing what he later recalled was a "melancholy but necessary duty",[14] he tracked down a group camping under the Cataract River[15] near Appin. According to the local historian Anne-Maree Whitaker, what followed on 17 April 1816 was a massacre.
Hearing a child's cry and a barking dog in the bush, Wallis lined up his soldiers to search for the fugitives. In the moonlight they could see figures jumping across the rocky landscape. Some of the Aborigines were shot and others were driven off the cliffs into a steep gorge. At least fourteen were killed and the only survivors were two women and three children. Among those killed was a mountain chief Conibigal,[a] an old man called Balyin, a Dharawal man called Dunell, along with several women and children.[16][14]
Aboriginal descendants claim the figure of 14 is an underestimate, and that many more were slaughtered.[17] The bodies of Conibigal and Dunell, after being decapitated, were hung from trees near Broughton's property, as a warning to foraging natives.[14] Their skulls, together with that of another beheaded woman, were exchanged for 30 shillings and a gallon of rum each in Sydney, according to the recollections of William Byrne in 1903,[14] and were sent to England where they were lodged for study at Edinburgh University, and were only returned in 1991 and 2000.[16] Negotiations have been underway for over a decade to have the remains, in Canberra, buried.[15] The area believed to be the site where the Appin Massacre took place was returned to the local Aboriginal community by an act of Parliament.[b]
Sixteen Gandangara people were captured as prisoners after the Appin massacre and four of their children were removed to the Native Institution at Parramatta. A young man named Dual was sentenced to seven years transportation to Van Diemen's Land for "his repeated crimes and offences" during the war.[18]
After the killing times
With the end of the war against the Gandangara, British colonists were able to enter their country and lay claims to land. In 1819, Charles Throsby led several expeditions into Gandangara territory, utilising local men such as Cookoogong and Dual (who had his sentence at Van Diemen's Land reduced and was returned to his home country) as guides. Throsby was subsequently given large grants of land in the region by Governor Macquarie including at Throsby Park.[18] Macquarie himself visited the area in 1820 meeting with a Gandangara elder of the Burru Burru clan named Nagaray.[19]
Conflict with the colonisers flared in 1826 around Lake Bathurst, where local Gandangara people killed a stockman after they returned from a cultural ceremony at Bong Bong. A subsequent punitive expedition organised by armed settlers was unsuccessful and Governor Ralph Darling sent Captain Peter Bishop with a contingent of soldiers of the 40th Regiment to capture or terrify the resident tribes into submission. One Gandangara man was caught and sent to Sydney but was later released. It was claimed that no blood was shed during this military operation.[20]
In 1828, there was some interaction between the Surveyor-General, Thomas Mitchell, and the Gandangara, near Mittagong. Mitchell was supervising road construction. The Gandarangara are said to have composed a cheeky song about the building of the road (perhaps with appropriate mimicry): Road goes creaking long shoes, Road goes uncle and brother white man see. It must have seemed that building a road just to visit kin was unnecessary effort. Men from the Gandarangara also acted as guides for Mitchell at the time.[citation needed]
Notwithstanding the attempts to disperse, intimidate, round them up, or kill them, the Gandangara population took refuge in the tough hinterlands like the Burragorong or at the estates of friendly colonists, and sustained themselves to the point where in the 1860s some claimed partial restitution of their lands.[9]
Burragorang Valley mission, "The Gully", and Goulburn "blacks' camp"
In 1877, many of the remnant population of the Gandangara who lived around the Wollondilly, Coxs Rivers, Picton and The Oaks were gathered together by Reverend George Dillon and placed on a mission in the Burragorang Valley. It was called the St Joseph's Aboriginal Settlement located at the junction of the Cox and Wollondilly Rivers (which is now underneath Lake Burragorang due to the development of the Warragamba Dam in the mid-20th century). Around 60 Gandangara men, women and children resided there and received an English style education, Catholic religious instruction and worked the adjacent farm owned by the church.[21]
The Gandangara of St Joseph's were interviewed in the early 1900s by the ethnographer R. H. Mathews, who took down some of their legendary lore.[22][23] William Russell, a respected Gandangara elder, was a Burragorang resident and wrote an important autobiography just before his death in 1914 at the age of 84.[24] St Joseph's produced several locally famous athletes including sprinter Stephen Sherrit and cricketer Joe Clarkson.[25]
Some Gandangara families avoided being placed at the mission, with John Riley and John Jingery being allowed to take up small leaseholds along the Wollondilly River, while Billy Lynch's family were allowed a conditional purchase of land in the Megalong Valley. Lynch was important in the establishment of a Gandangara encampment in 1897 at "The Gully" (Garguree) near Katoomba, which became home to a significant number of Gandangara and Dharug families for several decades.[26][27]
To the south in the Goulburn area, displaced Gandangara formed a fringe dwelling settlement or "blacks' camp", but they were moved on in 1898 to make way for the Goulburn golf course.[28]
When the St Joseph's mission at Burragorang was closed in the 1920s, most of the remaining residents were forced to move to the Aboriginal Reserve at La Perouse in coastal Sydney. Here, displaced Gandangara people became involved in Aboriginal rights, with W.G. Sherrit becoming an activist in the 1938 Day of Mourning.[29]
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Beliefs
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Gurangatch and Mirragañ
According to Gandangara belief, in the primordial dreamtime (gun-yung-ga-lung, "times far past"), two creator figures (bulla bulan), Gurangatch, a rainbow serpent, and Mirragañ, a quoll, went on a journey from a point on the upper reaches of the Wollondilly River, with Mirragan pursuing the former, until the trek ended at a waterhole named Joolundoo on the Upper Fish River. The distance covered by this serpentine movement and the pursuit extended some 169 kilometres (105 mi) away.[30] Much of this landscape with its minute Gandangara toponymic descriptions considered to be "one of the best documented Aboriginal cultural landscapes", was submerged with the construction of the Warragamba Dam after WW2.[31] At that time animals were human, and collectively the animal people of that pristine world were known as Burringilling.
Gurangatch, not wholly a serpent, but part fish, and part reptile, camped in the shallows of an area known as Murraural, specifically at the junction of the Wollondilly and Wingeecaribbee rivers. It was here, while he basked in the sun, that the redoubtable fish-hunter, Mirragañ the quoll, glimpsed the light reflected from Gurangatch's eyes and endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to spear him. The quoll tried to force his prey back from the depths of the waterhole, where Gurangatch had sought refuge, by planting ever more bundles of nauseating slabs of millewa hickory bark here and there in the various soaks and pools. Gurangatch, wise to the plan, burrowed his way out, tunneling through the landscape, drawing the lagoon waters in his train, till he emerged on a high rocky ridge called thereafter Birrimbunnungalai, since it is rich in birrimbunnung (sprats)[c][32]
The features of the landscape were etched as Gurangatch wriggled and slipped across and under the terrain, in flight from his predator, or sometimes while directly fighting with him. When Mirragañ caught up with his prey, he would flail away at him with a club (boodee), while Gurangatch would strike by thrashing his tormentor with a whipping from his tail. The site now called Slippery Rock, native name Wonggaree, marks a point where they engaged in struggle for a long time, wearing the rock down so smoothly that people slip on it ever since.[32] In a 2021 FlyLife article, Karl Brandt proposed the Australian lungfish as the inspiration for Gurangatch.[33]
Burrubug garabang
In a similar creation story, two gods (bulla bulan) pursued a giant kangaroo down the Wollondilly River where it hid in a waterhole creating the Burragorang Valley. The name Burragorang is derived from Burrubug garabang meaning "the great kangaroo's place" (of escape).[24]
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Notable people
- Cannabaygal
- Dual
- William Russell
- Billy Lynch
- Murrondah
- Cookoogong
- Nagaray
- Old Boyne
- Goondel
- Stephen Sherrit
- W.G. Sherrit
- John Jingery
- John Riley
See also
Notes
- "Former Wollondilly state Labor MP Phil Costa confirmed that while he was in parliament he assisted with the transfer of the land believed to be location of the Appin massacre to the Aboriginal community." (Bertola 2015)
References
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