Johnny Baswick, also known as Bankey or Pankey, was a well-known Aboriginal man among local European residents of the eastern suburbs in the 1870s but has been largely forgotten by history books. He was born in Coastal Sydney in the 1820s and by the 1870s he and his wife, Rachael, and their children were living in Aboriginal settlements at Bondi, Rose Bay and Bellevue Hill.

In the 1870s he was camped at Ben Buckler, at the north end of Bondi Beach, with several other Aboriginal families and they were often seen swimming together in the ocean. In 1873 Johnny was camped near the beach when he gave a statement to police about a fisherman who drowned nearby.

Around this time, he also lived with his family at Rose Bay. His son, Freddy, was said to have maintained the extensive rock engravings nearby at Point Piper, while Johnny was probably one of the people described at this time spearing fish from the rocks with an adapted traditional pronged fishing spear, where the prongs were swapped for umbrella wires.

Johnny’s group did the rounds of their European neighbours, trading fish and oysters.

Johnny, in particular, got to know many of the Europeans in the area. He visited William Dalley at his house at Rose Bay, and became friends with Bonus Clarke at Bondi, whose father owned a dairy there. It was at this farm where Johnny passed away in 1880.

Johnny’s life opens a window on a time in the eastern suburbs nearly a century after Europeans arrived, when Aboriginal people and Europeans knew each other well and often interacted. In the decades that followed, the government introduced policies and laws to segregate Aboriginal people, and this shared way of life was forgotten.

Courtesy the Gujaga Foundation and the State Library of New South Wales.