Bonyi Bush Books

Leaked audio reveals Queensland police staff in racist conversations, joking about violence to black people and protesters Sun 13 Nov 2022 Audio recordings taken at the Brisbane city police watch house reveal officers joking about beating and burying black people, referring to Nigerians as “jigaboos”, and raising fears that Australia “will be fucking taken over”. A series of tapes, leaked to Guard...

Eliza Fraser. As the first white woman to meet blackfullahs and to tell her tale, Eliza Fraser’s story was bound to have an impact. It has become a famous, archetypal encounter between a white woman and Australia’s Indigenous people and, from its earliest days, it was a powerful and influential tale that helped generate fear and prejudice about Aborigines and the frontier. Her tale of shipwreck on...

SKETCH OF A RESIDENCE  AMONG THE ABORIGINALS OF NORTHERN QUEENSLAND FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS; BEING A NARRATIVE OF MY LIFE, SHIPWRECK, LANDING, ON TIKI COAST, RESIDENCE AMONG THE ABORIGINALS, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR MANNERS AND CUSTOMS, AND MODE OF LIVING ; TOGETHER WITH NOTICES OF MANY OF ‘TILE NATURAL PRODUCTIONS, AND OF THE NATURE OF THIS COUNTRY, BY JAMES MORRILL. QUEENSLAND: PRINTED AT THE C...

For many thousands of years the world's largest island sand mass was called K'gari, or ‘paradise’, by its inhabitants. Then, in 1836, a group of shipwreck survivors from the brig Stirling Castle found their way to its shores. The death of Captain Fraser, and his wife Eliza's ordeals on the island until her rescue, was to make the sort of news that was lapped up around the world. These events were...

From Brisbane Courier 16 March 1861. To the Officer in Command of the Party of Native Police, who shot and wounded some Blacks on the Station of Manumbar, on Sunday, the 10th instant. Sir, — If in future you should take a fancy to bring your troopers upon the Station of Manumbar on a sporting excursion we shall feel obLIged if you would either bag or bury the game which you shoot as it is far from...

To those who have followed or studied John Carne Bidwill’s career, there appear a number of events during his appointment as Wide Bay Crown Lands Commissioner that appear out of character for a clueless idiot of his education and experience. His abilities as botanist, horticulturist and hybridist, in such early colonial days of Australia and New Zealand, are well accepted and praised by his peers,...

Central to Noosa Shire’s identity are places that comprise it. How did they arrive at their names? As is true of place-naming in every part of Australia, there are many stories, some conflicting. Here we focus solely on placenames of the core area of Noosa and Tewantin. The story of these words focuses attention on an important 19th Century headman (major elder) known as ‘King Tommy.’ How Aborigin...

THE BLACK WAR IN QUEENSLAND By ARTHUR LAURIE (Read before the Meeting of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland on October 23, 1958).The white man came and shot game and trespassed anywhere without permission. When a white man took up land or a station, he expected the blacks of that locality to move back into other territory, un- conscious that this would be an unpardonable violatio...

Broadly, the ‘Frontier Wars’ comprises the times of greatest hostility and conflict between Aboriginal groups and European invaders (settlers). For the region of the Sunshine Coast, it ran from the 1830s to 1870s, with worst incidents in the 1840s to 1860s – concurrent with the advancing tide of settlement of the district. Sadly, our understanding of ‘Frontier Wars’ in Australia is marred by extre...

In this part; Jack Napoleon,  Dundalli,  Jandamurra  the Kalkadoons. download eBook; http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/127.pdf

Windradyne of the Wirradjuri Musquito and the Black Banditti Yagan of the Nyungar , by David Lowe A collection of biographies of Aboriginal resistance fighters; chapters on Windradyne, Musquito, Yagan, Jack Napoleon, Dundalli, Jandamurra and the Kalkadoons. Download the eBook; http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/127.pdf

Wild White Men in Queensland. By Cilento, Raphael and Lack, Clem (1959) The First Wild White Men. Pamphlett and Finnegan (April to December, 1823), and Parsons (April 1823 to September 1824) were the first white men known to have lived with the blackfullahs in what is now Queensland. The best known "wild white men" in the area between Moreton Bay, the Darling Downs, and the Burnett area, were: Joh...

Written by Constance Campbell Petrie, this invaluable work of social history vividly describes life in the Moreton Bay penal settlement from the 1830s." "Tom was over sixty years old when he told his life story to his daughter Constance

The Kabi Genocide - Deportation to Barambah by Ray Gibbons (2019) Queensland Aboriginals suffered a rolling genocide across multiple phases from invasion to  deportation and repression, group by group, area by area. We deconstruct this fractal-like process  in a companion volume. For now, we will briefly focus on one particular language group (the Kabi of  the Sunshine Coast) for on...

Author(s): Greg Blyton Source: Aboriginal History, 2015, Vol. 39 (2015), pp. 63-82 In recent years there have been a number of important historical works which recognise the important contribution of Aboriginal guides in the exploration of Australia. This article contributes to this field by providing a narrative history of a young Aboriginal man from Newcastle called Harry Brown who accompanied t...

The Dreaming of Kin Kin. A story about the little black ants of Kin Kin. In the ancestor time at War'pbunga-nga, the Land of the Frogs and Wub'onga-nga, the Land of the Mosses and ferns, there lived two little peoples called the Wa'baungi: the Frog People and the Wu'banga: the People who come out of the Moss. They lived high in the great ceedar, beech and bunya trees where none could see or find t...

A Survey of Early Settlement in the Maroochy District up to the Passing of the Crown Lands Alienation Act, 1868. by E.G. heaps ABORIGINES OF THE MAROOCHY DISTRICT The early settlers in the Maroochy District were not long in the area before  they came into contact with its native inhabitants, the Kabi, whose territory  embraced the country drained by the Burrum, Mary, Maroochy, and Mooloo...

Aboriginal Pathways in Southeast Queensland and the Richmond River by J.G. Steele University of Queensland Press .  1982 The Brisbane Area. This chapter considers the area in which the Turrbal language was spoken. Since the extent of this area has sometimes been disputed, let it be stated clearly that the evidence of Tom Petrie is accepted here. When challenged about the scope of the Turrbal...

The Aboriginal people of the area now known as Cooloola Shire spoke a language named Kabi after the word they used for 'No'. Dialects of this language were spoken among the Aboriginal groups who occupied particular territories from Childers in the north to Bribie Island in the south and west to the mountains that divide the Mary and Burnett Rivers. Only fragments of information about the tradition...

" Bon-yi," the native name for the pine, Araucaria Bidwilli, has been wrongly accepted and pronounced bunya. To the blacks it was bon-yi, the " i " being sounded as an " e " in English, "bon-ye." Grandfather (Andrew Petrie) discovered this tree, but he gave some specimens to a Mr. Bidwill, who forwarded them to the old country, and hence the tree was named after him, not after the true discoverer....

Gilburri On Sunday 24 April, 1842, Fahy was able to escape again. One news report, written over sixty years after Fahy’s escape that day, said that he was able to knock out their obnoxious overseer, and commit him to a miserable death tied down to an ant's nest. Over 80 years later Meston was to repeat the same story in his article Life Among Blacks. Convict records list only one man escaping from...

The forest country was well wooded and abounded in marsupial game of several varieties. Native bears and opossums were very numerous, as were also kangaroos and wallabies, kangaroo rats and bandicoots. The streams were plentifully stocked with mullet, cat-fish, barramundi and eels. Along the sea-shore the usual produce of the Australian tropical seas was available. Of bird-life there were very man...

Murri mob smoke SIGNALLING

NAMBOUR is thousands of years old!  Like many towns in Australia, it began as an Aboriginal camping ground that probably flourished on the same spot for millenia.   What was Nambour like before white settlement? The first white visitors describe a grassy, open forest flat (kept clear by regular Indigenous firing). Namba flat” was roughly what we now know as Nambour Showgrounds – stretchi...