1845

On 1 November 1845, a whale washed ashore just north of Bondi Beach. News of this event was brought to centre of Sydney town by the Aboriginal people living at the traditional camp at Bondi. In addition to this being a somewhat rare event, there are a number of other interesting aspects of this story. Firstly, it shows that Aboriginal people were living at Bondi in 1845, just as they were in the 1870s and all through the 19th century. The consistent presence of Aboriginal people in the Bondi area for such a long time after colonisation is not frequently acknowledged in the history of the area.

The story also shows how comfortable Coastal Sydney Aboriginal people were in engaging with the colony at the time. The fact that the Aboriginal people camping at Bondi took the time to walk into Sydney town (today’s CBD) to tell settlers of the whale beaching indicates that they had relationships with some of the Europeans living there. These types of relationships were commonplace, as shown by records through the nineteenth century of Coastal Sydney Aboriginal identities such as Mahroot, Cora Gooseberry, William Warrell and Thomas Tamara frequenting Sydney town and the properties of other Europeans around the eastern suburbs as it pleased them.

Although Europeans did not realise it at the time, these Aboriginal people were moving within their traditional cultural area, which happened to include Sydney town and surrounding areas and areas along the coast to the north and south. The term ‘Sydney’ also had a different meaning then. In the 19th century Aboriginal people said to be travelling from outside of “Sydney” simply meant that they were coming from outside of the centre of the town rather than outside the whole Sydney region as we know it today. By this definition, Bondi and Rose Bay were “outside of Sydney”. Once we understand this, we can see that Aboriginal people with a traditional connection to Coastal Sydney, despite not living in the centre of ‘Sydney’ itself, continued to live in the area and were comfortable travelling into the town and leveraging the personal relationships they had built up with settlers where necessary.

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