William Warrell was born around the time Europeans arrived in Sydney. He was linked to the Sydney area through his Botany Bay mother, and to the Illawarra (Wollongong) area through his father. He was the cousin of Sydney woman Cora Gooseberry (1770s–1852), who married early colonial Aboriginal identity Bungaree (1770s–1830).

William was born into a time of tremendous and extreme change: European settlers invading the land, a devastating number of Aboriginal people dying from disease and violent conflict, as well as traditions and cultural knowledge being lost with those people. William’s Aboriginal language was his mother tongue, and his connection to Sydney was widely acknowledged by Europeans.

We know little about the first decades of his life, but by the 1840s he was living around Coastal Sydney and was a well-known visitor to Sydney town with his cousin Cora Gooseberry. Cora was a senior woman of Coastal Sydney with extensive knowledge of traditions and customs, and William travelled along the coast between Sydney and Wollongong, which suggests that they would have had a wealth of cultural knowledge between them.

By the 1850s William was increasingly paralysed and moved permanently to his traditional lands at Rose Bay, where he would often be seen sitting by the roadside swaddled in blankets. He had wealthy and powerful European neighbours, who were aware of his connection to the area. They could have asked him to move on, but instead they accepted his presence on their doorstep and respectfully helped him out when he was ill.

When William Warrell died of lung cancer in 1863 due to long exposure to the cold, he was referred to as the ‘last’ of his tribe, but many other Aboriginal people continued to live at Rose Bay in the decades after his death.

William was a Sydney identity. In the 1870s, local silversmith Julius Hogarth used William’s profile as his template for the ‘ex rex’ (former king) side of souvenir medallions purchased by visitors to intercolonial exhibitions in Sydney, and in Melbourne and Brisbane under a different name.

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