“Has not the Governor lent you a coat?” “Not yet; but he len’ it by-and-by. At present he only len’ it, ‘Very busy now; yes, yes; good morning.’”
“What do you think of Sir George Gipps?” “When that my frien’ Doctor Lang write a book about all the gubbernors, he one day met it in Domain, and len’ it half a dump. He then laugh and say, ‘King Bungaree, what you think of Gubbernor Bourke?’ and I say to him, ‘Stop a bit. He no yet leave the colney. When he go, then I tell you, master.’ Gubbernor Gipps only just come. Stop till he go, then I speak.”
Doctor Lang, in his admirable work, the History of New South Wales, relates this in his preface or concluding chapter, observing that he took King Bungaree’s hint, and reserved Sir Richard Bourke’s Administration for some future edition.
King Bungaree (after swallowing another “loan”), in reply to my questions, said that when the tribe to which he belonged first beheld the big ships, some thought they were sea monsters; others that they were gigantic birds, and the sails were their wings; while many declared that they were a mixture of gigantic fish and gigantic bird, and that the boats which were towed astern were their young ones. He heightened his description by acting the consternation of the tribe on that occasion. He told me they were too much terrified to offer any hostile demonstrations, and that when they first heard the report of a musket, and of a ship’s gun, they fancied those weapons were living agents of the white man; that where the town of Sydney was situated, kangaroos formerly abounded, and that these animals were seldom speared or interfered with; that fish and oysters and the native fruits were their chief articles of food, and that animals—the kangaroo and opossum—were killed only to supply the little amount of clothing then required amongst them; that the use of the hook and line was unknown until the establishment of the Colony; and that a spear, constructed for the especial purpose, was the only means they had of taking fish in the shallow waters of the bays. The deep-sea fish—the “schnapper,” the “king-fish,” the “grounder,” and the rock cod—were beyond their reach. Mullet, whiting, and mackerel, which came in large shoals within range of the spear, were the only species they had tasted. Sometimes a shark, which had followed the smaller fish into the shallow water, and swam with his fins above the surface, would fall a victim to the spear.
Each tribe rarely numbered more than fifty or sixty, and the chief was, by right, the oldest man in it. When they increased and multiplied beyond that number, fifty or sixty, there was a new tribe formed, and they occupied a distinct tract of land, to which they were required to confine themselves. This tract of land rarely exceeded an area of 40 miles in extent. Strange to say, the tribes beyond Parramatta did not understand the language of the Sydney (Woolloomooloo) tribe. The tribes on the north shore had no communication with the tribes on the south shore, except when they invaded each other—which was seldom—and did battle. On these occasions they swam the harbour, carrying their spears, waddies (clubs), boomerangs, and shields on their heads. The object of these invasions was to plunder each other of women. King Bungaree denied that they were cannibals; but admitted that they roasted and tasted the enemies whom they slew in battle. The waddies and spears of the different tribes were not exactly alike in make, but the boomerang was of uniform construction; and I know, of my own personal experience subsequently acquired, that amongst all the savage tribes of New Holland, the use of the boomerang is universal. Sir Thomas Mitchell, late Surveyor-General of Australia, and a very able mathematician, when he first saw the flight of a boomerang, and examined the weapon, exclaimed, “The savage who invented this, in whatever time, was gifted by the Creator with a knowledge which He has withheld from civilized man.” And, writing of the boomerang propeller, Sir Thomas says, “That rotary motion can be communicated to an instrument, acting as a screw, so as to be sustained in air, without causing that fluid to recede, is suggested by the flight of the boomerang, a missile which few in this country can have seen used, or seen at all. This is a thin flat weapon, shaped somewhat like a new moon, but not so pointed at the cusps, and more resembling in the middle an elbow than an arc, being about two feet long, two inches broad, seldom so much as a quarter of an inch thick, and made of hard, heavy wood. The natives of Australia throw this to great distances, and to great heights in the air, imparting to it two sorts of motion, one of which is direct, the other rotary, by which last the missile revolves round its own centre of gravity, having a twist into the plane of a very fine screw. The effect of this almost imperceptible screw on air, all who have been witnesses to a boomerang’s flight will remember. To those who have not, we can only say that the rotary motion survives the direct impetus with which the weapon is made to ascend, so as to make it screw its way back to the very spot from whence it was thrown, thus enabling mere gravitation to undo all the effect of the thrower’s arm in sending it upwards.”
When I was a boy, Bungaree had been a matter of mere amusement to me. Now I was a man, he was an object of interest; able as he was to remember the first big ships that entered Sydney harbour, when the penal settlement was founded; the sensations of the tribe to which he, then a boy, belonged when they beheld them; and the terror which prevailed when the savage, for the first time, saw the face and clothed form of the white man. He had often talked to me of these and other such matters; but I was then too young to take any interest in his discourse, further than what related to the best bays to fish in, or the localities in which “five-corners,” “ground berries,” and “gollions” (native fruits) were most plentiful. As for fish, even if I had had now any desire to catch them, I could not have done it in any of the bays of Sydney harbour. Like the kangaroo and the emu, they had retreated beyond the bounds of civilized and busy life. They were now only to be caught in the bays outside “the Heads.” As to the native fruits I have mentioned, I doubt whether I could have obtained a quart within five miles of Sydney, had I offered five guineas for it.
The children, male and female, of the aborigines were taught, or rather made, to swim by being put into deep water soon after they were born. As swimmers and divers, I do not think the blacks of New South Wales were superior to the Arabs at Aden, or the Cingalese at Ceylon, but they were certainly equal to them. A captain of a ship in the harbour of Port Jackson once lost a case of claret overboard—a six-dozen case. The ship was anchored in eight fathoms of water. Four blacks dived down and brought it up, each man holding a corner of the chest on the palm of his left hand. Incredible as it may seem, they were under the surface of the stream for more than three minutes. I can remember one day, when out with King Bungaree in his boat, losing a penknife with which I was cutting bait on the gunwale. Queen Onion cried out, “I get it!” and, dropping from the boat’s bow in her bedgown, she lifted her hands and went down like a stone or a shot. After being lost to sight for at least a minute and a half, up she came, like a bundle of old clothes, with the penknife in her mouth. We were then fishing off Garden Island, where the water is very deep. I doubt if there were less than fifteen fathoms under our keel.
The power of “tracking” was still left to old King Bungaree and his tribe, but they rarely or never exercised it. Their savage and simple natures had been contaminated and corrupted by their more civilized fellow-creatures, and their whole thoughts seemed to be centered in how they could most speedily become intoxicated and sleep off its effects. Bread and rum, Bungaree said, were at first distasteful to his palate; but after a while “he liked ’em berry much, and did not care for nothing else.” King Bungaree was the only old aboriginal I ever saw in the vicinity of Sydney. Drink and its effects destroyed the majority of both sexes long before they attained the prime of life. How the race continued to be propagated within 50 miles of Sydney, even when I last left the Colony, in 1843, was more than I could understand. It was otherwise, however, in the far distant interior. Some of the wild tribes in the squatting districts (where rum and tobacco were too precious to be given to the blacks, either out of freak or a misplaced generosity) were as fine specimens of the human shape as any sculptor could desire as models. In addition to the elegance of their forms, their eyes were brilliant and piercing, their teeth white as snow, their agility superhuman, and their love of innocent mirth perfectly childlike.
Of King Bungaree’s principles and opinions I scarcely know what to say; nor even, as his biographer, am I particularly anxious to dilate on the subject. But I may mention that he one day confessed to me that, of all the Governors who ever swayed the destinies of New South Wales, General Macquarie was the greatest man. On probing him for his reasons, I discovered that the kind-hearted old officer, whom he held in such respect and veneration, was his greatest creditor. The General, according to His Majesty’s account (and I believe him implicitly), had “lent” him more cocked-hats, more coats, more shirts, more loaves of bread, and more glasses of grog, than any other ruler in Australia; and, further, he told me it was General Macquarie who “lent” him that brass plate which he wore for so many, many years, and which was no doubt found on His Majesty’s breast when he breathed his last.
The writer does not give any account of the king’s death and burial. It seems that he died on Garden Island, that a coffin was made for his remains at the dock-yard, and that the interment took place with his wife Gooseberry in an orchard at Ryde. Whether any memorial remains I am not aware, but a stone was placed over his place of sepulture.