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." 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. In 1811
Governor Macquarie started handing out numerous "land grants" to settlers in the
Darawal area around
Appin, one as large as given to William Broughton.
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. 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, 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. 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.
Appin massacre , killed during the
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. Those punitive expeditions aimed to strike terror into anyone surviving them. 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", he tracked down a group camping under the
Cataract River 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
Cannabaygal, an old man called Balyin, a Dharawal man called Dunell, along with several women and children. Aboriginal descendants claim the figure of 14 is an underestimate, and that many more were slaughtered. The bodies of
Cannabaygal and Dunell, after being decapitated, were hung from trees near Broughton's property, as a warning to foraging natives. 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, and were sent to England where they were lodged for study at
Edinburgh University, and were only returned in 1991 and 2000. Negotiations have been underway for over a decade to have the remains, in Canberra, buried. 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. 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
Duall was sentenced to seven years transportation to
Van Diemen's Land for "his repeated crimes and offences" during the war.
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 and
Hamilton Hume led several expeditions into Gandangara territory, utilising local men such as Cookoogong and
Duall (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. 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. 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.
Charley Tarra, a Gandangara man from the Burru Burru clan, became famous in the early 1840s for guiding the Polish explorer
Paweł Strzelecki across the
Australian Alps and through
Gippsland. Notwithstanding the attempts to disperse, intimidate, round them up, or kill them, the Gandangara population took refuge in the isolated hinterlands like the
Burragorang Valley or at the estates of friendly colonists, and sustained themselves to the point where in the 1860s some claimed partial restitution of their lands. From 1869, several Gandangara men who had made land claims in the Burragorang Valley, also enrolled to vote in New South Wales. These men, such as George Riley, Jackey Karobin and Solomon Toliman were probably the first Aboriginal people in New South Wales and possibly Australia who were allowed to be placed on the electoral roll. In the 1870s some Gandangara families such as William Davis were able to safely move back into traditional country from which their forebears were displaced. Davis and his wife Caroline became known by the white people as the "king" and "queen" of Hartley and the Cox's River. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. == Beliefs ==