TURRBAL HISTORY
CULTURE HERITAGE ENVIRONMENT NATIVE TITLE
A SNAPSHOT OF TURRBAL HISTORY IN BRISBANE
Prior
to European settlement in Brisbane in 1825, the Turrbal people, according to Tom
Petrie (of the founding family of modem-day Brisbane), occupied the area of land
extending far inland to the Gold Creek or Moggill, as far north as North Pine,
and south to the Logan River ... Of all the blackfellows who were boys when he was a
boy there is only one survivor; most of them died off prematurely through drink
introduced by the white men (Constance Petrie, Tom
Petrie's Reminiscences of early Queensland 1904, pp. 4-5).
It is this story of near-extinction of the Turrbal people, the original
inhabitants of the Brisbane area, that has enticed some neighbouring tribal
groups (such as the so-called "Jagera", Quandamooka, Gubbi Gubbi,
Wakka Wakka and others) at the beginning of the 1900s to attempt to falsely
claim Brisbane as their ancestral homelands.
As the forthcoming book titled The
Surviving Turrbal written by Turrbal Songwoman Maroochy Barambah and
Principal Adviser Ade Kukoyi reveals, the Turrbal people "are not all dead
and gone". They are alive and
well, and their compelling story goes back to the heroic and inspiring survival
of Maroochy Barambah's great, great, great grandmother named Kulkarawa.
EARLIEST
ACCOUNTS OF MODERN-DAY BRISBANE
Pioneering
explorer, John Oxley, in 1824, noted a large assemblage of Turrbal people along
the present-day site of the Wesley hospital, the Regatta hotel and Coronation
Drive on account of water being present there.
In 1823, the three castaways (Pamphlett, Parsons and Finnegan) had a
rather tense encounter with some of the Turrbal people in the vicinity of the
present-day central business district. The
shipwrecked timber-getters had earlier set out from Sydney in a sailing boat
bound for the Illawarra district to cut cedar but were been blown off course.
The
earliest historical records suggest that Brisbane was well inhabited by the
Turrbal people. In fact, this dense
inhabitation was one of the many reasons, which attracted the early settlers to
'Meeaan-jin' (Turrbal name for Brisbane) following their initial abortive
settlement at Humpybong (Redcliffe) in 1824.
The various pathways (Aboriginal tracks) that had existed since the
Dreamtime were later to form the basis of road infrastructures around Brisbane
today. Examples of these include
Waterworks Road and the Old Northern Road.
Waterworks Road for example was built on a Turrbal pathway that led Mount
Coot-tha - a place of the honey-bee Dreaming. The Old Northern Road was the pathway that led to triennial
Bunya feast in Wakka Wakka country. Toowong
had a ceremony ring upon which a pub (The Regatta Hotel) is believed to be standing
today.
FUTURE
PROSPECTS
As
we begin a new millennium, the task ahead of the surviving Turrbal people is one
of cultural revitalisation, says Turrbal Law-woman & Songwoman Maroochy
Barambah. Part of that process is
the publication of a Turrbal history book The
Surviving Turrbal which the Turrbal people hopes will form an integral
part of history and social science studies in schools all over their ancestral
homelands. Maroochy says that it is
very important that Queenslanders know and understand their true history. This is not an era for blaming or finger pointing.