Brenda L. Croft

‘There was one Eora woman who the British officers found very striking, and a little frightening too.’ (1)

Cammeraygal (2) woman Barangaroo (c.1750–91) was the second wife of a younger Wangal man, Woollarawarre Bennelong (c.1763/4–1813). (3) Or, in this context, he was her second husband. Better known as Bennelong, his name has been memorialised in numerous sites around Sydney, most notably Bennelong Point, now the site of the Sydney Opera House.

Barangaroo, renowned for her mastery as a fisherwoman and her staunch attitude towards the early colonisers, is less well known. Her people were custodians of North Head and Manly. At the time of first contact, the Cammeraygal were considered ‘the largest and most influential group in the Sydney coastal region.’ (4) Her people’s standing likely shaped Barangaroo’s attitude towards the new arrivals.

Barangaroo and Bennelong were documented as appearing ‘fond of each other,’ (5) while also sharing an intense and often volatile relationship. Near the final stages of Barangaroo’s pregnancy in 1791, some records have Bennelong pressuring her to give birth at Government House. Historian Grace Karskens informs us that Barangaroo refused Bennelong’s entreaty that she have the child at the premises of the colony’s leading representative. (6)

Barangaroo birthed her baby girl, Dilboong (Bellbird), on the outskirts of the township, alone. Not long after giving birth, Barangaroo – the feisty, determined, and spirited Cammeraygal woman – died. Her fishing gear was cremated with her, with Bennelong burying her ashes in the garden of Government House near the still-pristine waters of Warrane/Warrang (Sydney Harbour).

A few months later, the infant Dilboong died and was also buried in the grounds of Government House. Bennelong is documented as spending a number of nights mourning by her grave, and that of Barangaroo.

Barangaroo acts as a constant Ancestral guide for this series, which also responds to her namesake site – reclaimed and reconstructed land bordering Warrane/Warrang. First Nations names, clans, nations, and language words are used for place names, as de facto memorials to displaced, dispersed custodians – often corrupted by an unfamiliar tongue, with minimal reference to the origin except in heritage reports. This begs the question: Whose heritage are we honouring with these acts of corporeal, cultural erasure?

The naming of the Barangaroo precinct prised open the colonial project of denial and negation, calling up the Cammeraygal woman who inspired the site’s selection for a highly desired part of Sydney’s CBD. The colonial recognition of Barangaroo echoes across the centuries. Here she is, embodied and reflected back by the collective gaze – direct, challenging, averted, inward, beyond – of contemporary First Nations women and girls.

I/we come from t/here – if not through immediate cultural ties, then through more than two centuries of colonisation, displacement, erasure, and wilful cultural amnesia.

Don’t mess with me/us. I am/we are a force to be reckoned with. I am/we are not a place name for reclaimed, reshaped land; an obscenely exclusive playground for the wealthy to defile my/her name. Ignore me/us at your own peril. Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me).

(1) Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009, p.401.
(2) Alternative spellings include Gammeraygal, Gamaraigal, and Cammeraygal. See Grace Karskens, ‘Cameragal people’, in The Dictionary Of Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, retrieved 15 February 2016, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/organisation/cameragal_people.
(3) See Keith Vincent Smith, ‘Woollarawarre Bennelong’, in The Dictionary of Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, retrieved 15 February 2016, http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/woollarawarre_bennelong.
(4) Grace Karskens, ‘Barangaroo, a woman worth remembering’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 2010, retrieved 6 March 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/barangaroo-a-woman-worth-remembering-20100305-pot6.html#ixzz40Bx3U2W6.
(5) Grace Karskens, ‘Barangaroo and the Eora fisherwoman,’ in The Dictionary of Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, retrieved 7 January 2023, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/barangaroo_and_the_eora_fisherwomen.
(6) ibid.