The Life and Legacy of Australia’s Trailblazing Indigenous Explorer, Bungaree, the First Aboriginal to Circumnavigate the Continent.
By Alec Smart
Bungaree, a Garigal Aboriginal from the north shore of Broken Bay, is best known for accompanying Lieutenant Matthew Flinders on his 1802-3 exploratory voyage to chart Australia. As a result, they discovered it was one island continent – not two separate land masses as previously suspected. Bungaree became the first native-born Australian to circumnavigate Australia.
As an adviser on edible plants and a mediator in encounters with Indigenous Aboriginals, Bungaree played a vital role during the maritime exploration of Australia in the early 19th century. He is also celebrated as an ambassador and statesman for his people.
Afterwards, Bungaree was encouraged by Governor Macquarie to farm a plot of land near Middle Head, at the approximate location of Georges Heights Oval.
Bungaree had a cheeky sense of humour and was renowned for his larrikinism and mimicry of several successive NSW Governors, who considered him a friend.
In later years, when newly-arrived ships entered Sydney Harbour, Bungaree frequently rowed his fishing boat out to greet them.
He was usually joined by Cora Gooseberry, the ‘queen’ among his two or three wives, and would perform a welcome to country on the incoming vessel’s deck. Typically, he’d wear his familiar ex-Navy bicorne hat and one of several British military uniforms he’d been gifted.
Because of Bungaree’s importance to the early British settlement of Sydney, at least 18 formal portraits were painted of him. In addition, there are several historical landscapes and group portraits in which he appears as a minor figure.
Bungaree is believed to have been born near Rocky Point, Wyong, around 1775-78. As a young adult in the 1790s he travelled south to the British penal settlement of Sydney, and eventually found work as a crew member on HMS Reliance in 1798.
Reliance brought explorer Matthew Flinders, new Governor John Hunter, and Aboriginal leader Bennelong back from England to Sydney in 1795, arriving in September that year.
Bungaree first came to midshipman Matthew Flinders’ attention in 1798, during a voyage to Norfolk Island aboard the HMS Reliance commanded by Captain Henry Waterhouse, possibly transporting convicts.
Prior to their epic circumnavigation of Australia, Bungaree aided Flinders on a mission to explore Moreton Bay and Hervey Bay in July-August 1799 on the sloop Norfolk. Because the Moreton and Hervey Bays exploration involved several treks on foot, following creeks inland and ascending mountains, the Britons inevitably encountered Indigenous inhabitants. Bungaree’s communication skills facilitated their passage, despite his being a Dharug speaker, a different dialect to the local clans.
Flinders is credited for recommending ‘Australia’ as the name of great southern land – terra Australis - previously known as New South Wales (the eastern half) and New Holland (the west). However, before he undertook the great voyage, no one was sure if they were two separate countries.
In September 1800, Flinders proposed to resolve the dilemma, and was given command of The Investigator, a refitted Royal Navy vessel of 300+ tonnes that most suited the task of coastal surveying. Simultaneously, a French mission, commanded by Captain Nicholas Baudin, was undertaking a similar voyage.
In the spirit of cooperation, each nation issued the competing captains a passport from their country, because the French initially had a claim to the southern territory of New Holland – which they proposed naming Terre Napoleon.
Flinders actually encountered Baudin after the latter’s corvette, La Geographe, was blown off-course by a storm. The two breakfasted together on the morning of 9 April 1802 in a cove on the south coast Flinders named Encounter Bay, near Kangaroo Island.
Flinders later recorded that after the two captains compared the new navigational charts they’d drafted, the Frenchman appeared dejected. No doubt Baudin realised that their respective surveys had revealed Australia didn’t consist of two large land masses, but was instead one giant continent, securing Britain’s claim to the territory. Nevertheless, many of the names Baudin allocated to geographic locations he’d observed en-route were later adopted.
Flinders initially began charting the South Australian coast from 6 December 1801, after sailing from England. But during a 12-week break in Sydney for essential ship repairs (replacing rotten timbers) and to take on supplies and supplementary crew, he sought out and recruited Bungaree.
On 22 July 1802, Lieutenant Matthew Flinders and assorted surveyors, scientists, illustrators, botanists and ship’s crew, set off in an anti-clockwise direction.
On an 18-month voyage between July 1802 – June 1803, Flinders, Bungaree and the crew were the first people to circumnavigate the newly confirmed island continent of Australia.
Sailing in uncharted, treacherous waters and occasionally enduring tragic events, Bungaree provided essential advice and companionship to Commander Finders. He mediated discussions with Indigenous peoples when The Investigator anchored and crew members went ashore, and was able to identify edible plants among the potentially poisonous native flora.
After they were fêted for their incredible accomplishment, both men went on to significantly different lives. Bungaree returned to Sydney, where he enjoyed celebrity status, while misfortune befell the Lieutenant Captain.
Flinders endured six-and-a-half years of wrongful imprisonment as a ‘spy’ by the Napoleonic French on the East African island of Mauritius, from 1804 to 1810. Back home in England and suffering ill health as a result of his long incarceration, Flinders wrote his memoirs of the pioneering voyage, A Voyage to Terra Australis.
The majority of his report, illustrated with drawings and maps, he had to fund himself due to the British Admiralty’s rejection of Flinders’ fascinating and detailed narrative – they limited their interest to his sea charts.
The two-volume chronicle was finally published on 19 July 1814; the following day Flinders succumbed to his health problems and died of kidney disease, aged just 40. He had lapsed into unconsciousness by the time the first printed edition was brought home for his inspection and never saw his completed master work.
1,000 copies of the first edition of Voyage to Terra Australis were published. Peter Harrington Antiquarian Booksellers are currently selling a well-preserved version for £37,500 ($Aus73,900).
The location of Flinders’ grave in London’s St James’ Cemetery was lost to history in 1852, due to the graveyard becoming overcrowded with bodies (over time it far exceeded its 16,000 capacity and absorbed 60,000 corpses).
However, Flinders’ coffin was recently rediscovered in January 2019 during excavations for the HS2 high-speed rail link construction, thanks to a lead nameplate on the casket – lead doesn’t corrode like steel and aluminium.
On 13 July 2024, Flinders remains were formally reburied in Donington, Lincolnshire, the village where he was born.
In February 1815, Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth Governor of NSW, issued a land grant to Bungaree and 14 other Aboriginal men and their families of 15 acres (61,000m2). The first land grant issued to Indigenous people by British colonists, it was situated on fertile soil at Georges Heights, between Georges Head and Middle Head (in the vicinity of the current Georges Heights Oval).
The land came with residential huts, farming tools, seeds, clothing, ducks, pigs and a fishing boat.
It was created as an incentive for Indigenous people to abandon the hunter-gather existence in favour of European farming, which the Governor termed, the ‘Experiment towards the Civilization of these Natives’.
Macquarie also gifted Bungaree an engraved breastplate inscribed with the words "BOONGAREE – Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe – 1815".
Macquarie, who encouraged convict emancipation, favoured cooperative relations with Aboriginals for the purpose of assimilating them into white society. This despite owning two Indian slave boys he purchased as orphaned infants in Bombay and his wife’s family owning slave plantations in Antigua.
And yet, despite his land grant to Bungaree, following violent skirmishes between settlers and Aboriginals, Macquarie ordered severe retaliation against the increasing Indigenous resistance to the burgeoning colony.
His military reprisals led directly to the Appin Massacre of April 1816 and numerous atrocities committed along the Hawkesbury-Nepean in mid to late 1816 during the ‘Frontier Wars’, for which the perpetrators were often rewarded.
Although Bungaree reportedly grew peaches and other produce, within three years he took off on another maritime voyage of discovery, and was gone for 30 weeks. On 22 December 1817, the cutter HMS Mermaid departed Sydney under the command of Captain Phillip Parker King, to explore and survey Australia’s northern and north-west coasts.
Bungaree was aboard, employed to provide advice on which plants were safe to eat and to mediate with any Indigenous peoples they encountered.
Governor Macquarie’s Aboriginal farm experiment was a failure. According to the sign at the start of Bungaree’s Walkway, which follows the approximate course Bungaree walked between his Georges Heights land and the sea he so loved, “The farming experiment did not succeed and by 1821 had been almost entirely abandoned.”
In 1828, Bungaree and his family clan, including his wife Cora Gooseberry and their son Bowen, relocated to the Governor's Domain, the parkland adjacent to the Botanic Gardens. Here they survived principally on government rations, with Bungaree, now in his fifties, reportedly in severe decline.
Bungaree died on 18 November 1830 on Garden Island, after a lingering sickness attributable to alcoholism, and was buried in an unmarked grave beside one of his wives in Rose Bay.
Cora Gooseberry, Bungaree’s principle wife, lived until 30 July 1852, when she was found dead of ‘natural causes’ at the Sydney Arms Hotel in Castlereagh St, City. She was buried at Brickfield/Sandhills Cemetery, then later disinterred and buried in Pioneers Cemetery, Botany, when Brickfield was excavated in 1901 to expand Central Station.
There are many place names, institutions and geographical features named after Flinders throughout Australia, and a statue in central Sydney outside Mitchell Library on Macquarie Street.
These include the Flinders Ranges (South Australia), Flinders Island (in Bass Strait), Flinders Bay (Augusta, Western Australia), Flinders University (Adelaide), Flinders Highways (two, in Queensland and South Australia), the Melbourne seaside suburb of Flinders (on the Mornington Peninsula), the Australian Navy frigate HMAS Flinders (under construction), and even Flinders Street Station in Central Melbourne.
Even Flinders’ cat, Trim, which accompanied him on numerous sea voyages and eventually his confinement on Mauritius, has a statue on a window ledge behind Flinders’ statue in central Sydney.
Bungaree has fared less prominently in the commemorative stakes, despite his importance to Australian history.
A minelaying ship that later struck a mine and sank was named after him.
A cargo ship named Bungaree was requisitioned by the Australian Navy during WWII and outfitted as an auxiliary minelayer, operating between 1941-46. It was released from active military service after WWII and returned to its owners. It was on-sold twice and subsequently renamed Dampier, then Eastern Mariner.
Ironically, during deployment in Vietnam, the former minelayer struck a mine and sank in the Saigon River on 26 May 1966.
After it was salvaged by a Japanese company it operated briefly under the name Kitagawa Maru before being scrapped in 1968.
A small ferry that traverses Sydney Harbour, one of six first-generation Emerald Class ferries that began service in 2017, is also named Bungaree.
Otherwise, unlike Flinders’ cat, there are no statues commemorating Flinders’ trusted companion…
===================================================
Comments