Moorooboora’s Daughter
Keith Vincent Smith pieces together an Indigenous family tree from the days of early Sydney Cora Gooseberry Bungaree (c.1777–1852), better known as ‘Queen Gooseberry’, was the wife of the famous Broken Bay Aborigine ‘King Bungaree’. Since writing the entry for Cora Gooseberry in the recently published supplement to the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne University Press, 2005), I have now discovered that she was the daughter of Moorooboora (c.1758–1798), a well-known Aboriginal leader in early Sydney. The name Moorooboora means ‘pathway to Long Bay’, being derived from muru (‘pathway’) and Boora (‘Long Bay’). This is how the present seaside suburb of Maroubra gets its name. Throughout their territory, from Botany Bay in the south to Pittwater in the north, Sydney’s coastal Aboriginal clans, who called themselves Eora People, burned and maintained one-metre wide paths. Obed West, who often hunted with Aborigines at Botany Bay during the 1830s, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald (1882):
One notable path, which ran from Blackwattle Creek at the Brickfields Village (now Chippendale) southwards to the north shore of Botany Bay, was the forerunner of Botany Road. Boora Point is still the name of the north headland of Long Bay. (Boora had other meanings, including ‘cloud’, ‘sky’, ‘testicle’ and ‘circle’.) Long Bay was probably the site of an initiation ground or bora. In July 1845, the travelling artist George French Angas (1822–1886) and Sydney Police Inspector W. Augustus Miles (1798–1851), an amateur anthropologist, met Cora Gooseberry at Camp Cove and persuaded her to take them to see rock engravings at North Head and other places in Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour). In return she received flour and tobacco. From this visit, Angas sketched the outlines of men, shields, whales, fish and kangaroos, which were published in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (London 1847). Angas also painted a watercolour titled Old Queen Gooseberry, Widow of Bungaree which was exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, London, in 1846. When shown at the Australian Library in Bent Street, Sydney, in 1847, by the Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Australia, Angas’s portrait was captioned ‘Kaaroo, alias Old Gooseberry, widow of Bungaree’.
In the manuscript of a vocabulary titled ‘A List of Words used by the Natives of Port Jackson’, Daniel Southwell, master’s mate of HMS Sirius, who was based at the look-out post at Outer South Head during 1790–01, recorded: ‘Moorooborah, Daught. name’ as ‘Ba-ran-gan, Carra, Caroo, or Car-roo’. (For some reason Southwell’s uncle, the Reverend Weeden Butler, crossed out the original words as he transcribed them, but they are still legible.) This readily explains her English name Cora, and the title ‘Cora Gooseberry Freeman Bungaree, Queen of Sydney & Botany’ which was engraved on her metal breastplate or gorget—now among relics in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. According to the convict artist Thomas Watling (b.1762), Barangan meant ‘Goatfish’. A fish motif appears on this Mitchell Library gorget, and two fish on a second gorget engraved ‘Gooseberry Queen of Sydney to South Head’, now in the collection of the Australian Museum, Sydney. An entry in the vocabulary kept by Governor Arthur Phillip and his officers mentions ‘Barring ang - - - the name of a very handsome girl’. Barangan (Goatfish) was her totem name. Southwell said Barangan Carra (Cora Gooseberry) had a brother named Cabeary (Gobuare), whose totem name was D’yumal dy’umal, which ‘signified a hawk’. He might be the youth, identified as ‘Capou-er-re’ (Gobuerre), aged 16 to 18, who was tested for strength in 1802 on a measuring device called a dynamometer by the French explorer François Péron, who observed that he was ‘Quite well built for this country.’
Another brother, Yerinibe, was clubbed and killed in December 1797 by the Cadigal chief Colebee (see ‘Port Jackson People’, NLA News, July 2005). Yerinibe was buried by the side of the road (now Sydney’s George Street) outside the Military Barracks. Bennelong placed a waratah by his head and wrapped him in a blanket before the grave was covered with earth.
Moorooboora’s half-sister Daringa was Colebee’s wife, so Cora (Carra, or Kaaroo) Gooseberry was Colebee’s niece by marriage. In 1842, surveyor John Frederick Mann met ‘Queen Gooseberry’ and Boio (Lyrebird) or ‘Long Dick’ of the Walkeloa (Brisbane Water) clan at Tuggerah Lake on the central coast of New South Wales. In the Sydney Morning Herald (1882, 1900), Mann described ‘Long Dick’ as ‘a son of Bungaree and Queen Gooseberry’. One of Bungaree’s wives, probably Cora Gooseberry, was the mother of a fair-haired, light-skinned girl, whose father was a European. The Russian artist Pavel Mikhailov (1786–1840) painted watercolour portraits of this girl and other members of Bungaree’s family at Kirribilli in 1820. Writing in 1827, naval surgeon Peter Cunningham said that, if asked about her, Bungaree jokingly replied ‘My gin [wife] eatit too much white bread!’ When Cora Gooseberry Bungaree died on 30 July 1852, aged about 75 years, she was buried in the Devonshire Street (Sandhills) Cemetery near the Sydney Railway terminal, then at Redfern. During the building of Central Railway her remains and headstone (its inscription no longer legible) were removed, with many others, to the Pioneers Cemetery at Botany. History is like a puzzle, with the clues coming from numerous scattered sources. In this case, the clues include the caption of a painting, an entry in a vocabulary, the engraving on a breastplate, a record of a test of strength, and the meaning of some Aboriginal words, as well as the more usual personal memoirs and newspaper reports. The composite picture of Cora Gooseberry’s family tree emerges as all these clues come together. In the complexity of Aboriginal kinship affiliation, Moorooboora was an ally of Bennelong, but opposed to his brother-in-law Colebee. After defeating Colebee in a duel with clubs during a ritual revenge combat or ‘payback’ over the death of Yirinibe in January 1798, Moorooboora himself was speared in the hip by an unnamed assailant and died from his wounds. The fact that we now know that Cora Gooseberry’s father was Moorooboora adds significance to her description of North Head to George French Angas as a place ‘sacred to the koradgees, men potent in spells who were the Aboriginal priests, doctors or conjurers’. She explained that Aborigines did not live in such places because ‘Too much dibble-dibble walk about.’ She had also told Angas about Moorooboora’s reaction to the arrival of the First Fleet’s sailing ships at Botany Bay in 1788:
KEITH VINCENT SMITH is an historian, and author of King Bungaree (Kangaroo Press, 1992). He is co-curator, with Anthony Bourke, of Eora: Mapping Aboriginal Sydney 1770–1850, an exhibition scheduled for the Mitchell Library Galleries at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, from 5 June to 13 August 2006 |
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