Bungandidj people

Pre History

The territory of not only the Bunganndidj but also their neighbours the Meintangk, has been revealed, by archaeological explorations, to have been inhabited for some 30,000 years. Coastal occupation around the Robe and Cape Banks attests that habitation from, at a low estimate, 5,800 BP.^[6]

First Contact

First contact between the Bungandidj and Europeans occurred in the early 1820s. Panchy from the Bungandidj recounted to Christina Smith the story of the first sighting of ships at Rivoli Bay in either 1822 or 1823, and his mother's abduction for 3 months before she was able to escape when the ship put in at Guichen Bay.^[14]

When Governor George Grey led an expedition of surveyors, overland from Adelaide to Mt Gambier during April–May 1844, the diarist and painter George French Angas who accompanied them, noted that they found, from Woakwine Range onwards, numerous native tracks, and old encampments with abandoned wurlies, and heaps of banksia cones, which were used to make sweet drinks, mud weirs in swamps to catch fish, wicker-work traps to snare birds, and raised platform structures for spotting emus and kangaroos to hunt.^[15]

Conflict and dispossession

In November 1834 Edward Henty settled near Portland, starting the movement of European settlers and their sheep, cattle, horses and bullocks across the Western plains of Victoria and the south east region of South Australia. Settlement occurred rapidly over the following two decades with significant frontier conflict taking place involving theft of sheep, spearings, massacres and poisoning of the natives.^[16] Grey's expedition reported encountering very few indigenous people, no more than groups of two or three. The abundance of signs of previous native land use with the scarcity of sighted natives was explained as due to the smallpox, introduced by Europeans in the north, which has spread out, after devastating the Murray tribes and decimated aborigines further south.^[6]

There are a number of reports of poisoned flour or damper being given or left for natives in the settlement of Victoria and South Australia at the time.^[17] According to the accounts given by Pendowen, Neenimin and Barakbouranu, and narrated to Christina Smith:

We tasted the mutton, and found it very good; but we buried the damper, as we were afraid of being poisoned.^[14]

In 1843 Henry Arthur joined his brother Charles in establishing a sheep run at Mount Schank. Trouble with Buandig people and dingoes, however, drove the Arthur brothers to sell up in 1844. The Hentys also had problems with their Mount Gambier sheep runs with theft of their sheep and shepherds speared to death in 1844. Such heavy losses occurred that the Hentys were forced to withdraw all their flocks from the Mount Gambier run.The Leake brothers on their Glencoe Station also reported problems losing 1,000 sheep from their 16,000 flock during 1845.^[18] Hostilities are reported to have continued around the Glenelg River region for the next two years.

Mistreatment of aborigines was at a level in 1845 where the commissioner of police drew attention to the atrocious treatment in the Rivoli Bay District:

... damper poisoned with corrosive sublimate … [and] driving the Natives from the only watering places in the neighbourhood. The Native women appear likewise to have been sought after by the shepherds, whilst the men were driven from the stations with threats.^[19][20]

In 1848, the Avenue Range Station massacre occurred in the Guichen Bay region of South Australia. At least 9 indigenous Bungandidj Wattatonga clan people were allegedly murdered by the station owner James Brown who was subsequently charged with the crime.^[21][22] The case was dropped by the Crown for lack of European witnesses. Until that year, blacks were unable to testify under oath.^[23] Christina Smith's source from the Wattatonga tribe refers to 11 people killed in this incident by two white men. The cause of the massacre was the theft of sheep for food.^[24]

A report by Mr Smith to Dr Moorhouse, the Protector of Aborigines, in April 1851 reveals that "the natives belonging to the Rivoli Bay Tribe (Buandig) are all quiet, and most of them usefully employed in one way or another by the settlers." The report also raises with concern that "infanticide has been and is still practiced among the natives here.", and "relations existing between native woman and the Europeans are very discreditable."^[25]

As late as 1854, settlers on Bungandidj land still expressed fears of being attacked. The Leake Brothers of Glencoe Station built what they called their 'Frontier House' in 1854 which is described as a 'large homestead with slits in the walls through which rifles could be used against any likely intruder,' according to local historian Les Hill.^[26]

Gradually a certain accommodation was made with Buandig people working as station hands, shearers and domestic servants while remaining on their own land.

According to Bell and Marsden, aboriginal people made wurley encampments on the edge of Kingston and even moved into cottages at Rosetown on Kingston's northern side in 1877. The people often moved camp seasonally gathering and using traditional foods and using the traditional local burial ground. They record that the Blackford Reserve on the Bordertown Road was another locality where aboriginal people lived until the 1970s.^[19] Kingston and Bordertown were the territorial border shared between the Buandig and the Ngarrindjeri.

There are many people in the region who identify as Bungandidj today. Descendants of the Bungandidj and the Meintangk continue to nurture and protect their culture through the Kungari Aboriginal Cultural Association based in Kingston SE.^[27]

Citations