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Barangaroo was a Cammeraygal woman from the north side of Sydney Harbour, a fisherwoman of real standing, and the wife of Woollarawarre Bennelong. The First Fleet officers met her in the spring of 1790 and never quite knew what to make of her. She wouldn't wear their clothes, wouldn't drink their wine, broke Bennelong's fishing spear when he went off to visit the Governor, and grabbed at the flogger's arm when she was made to watch a convict whipped. She gave birth to her daughter Dilboong alone in the bush rather than at Government House, and she died not long after, in 1791. Bennelong cremated her with her fishing gear beside her and laid her ashes to rest in the Governor's garden. More than two centuries later the old East Darling Harbour wharves were renamed in her honour. This is her story, told from what the people who met her wrote down and what historians have made of it since.
Who Was Barangaroo?
The Dictionary of Sydney describes Barangaroo simply: an Eora woman of the Cameragal people, the second wife of Bennelong, "a skilled fisherwoman with presence and authority in her community and the early colony". Her people, the Cammeraygal (you'll also see it spelt Cameragal or Kamaraygal), lived on the north side of the harbour. Historian Grace Karskens places her country "around North Harbour and Manly" and calls the Cameragal "the largest and most influential group in the Sydney coastal region".
Watkin Tench, the marine officer whose books are our best window into these years, explained how those clan names worked. "Cemeeragal, means the men who reside in the bay of Cameera," he wrote, and the women of a group were named by adding "eean" to the end. So Barangaroo was a Cameragaleon, a woman of Cameera.
Nobody wrote down when she was born. Wikipedia gives c.1750. The officers who met her in 1790 guessed she was about forty, and Karskens makes the point that this matters. Barangaroo was older and more experienced than the young women the officers already knew, and she carried "wisdom, status and influence" to match.
Before Bennelong
By the time the British met her, Barangaroo's world had already been torn apart. Smallpox swept through the Eora in 1789, and Karskens notes that it killed a disproportionate number of women and old people. Barangaroo survived it, but it cost her dearly. She had lost a husband and two children. Karskens says it was smallpox that took them; Wikipedia says the husband "allegedly" died of it. After that she married a new and younger husband, the ambitious Bennelong, and in Karskens' words she was now "one of a reduced number of women who had the knowledge of laws, teaching and women's rituals", with authority over the younger women around her.
The Fisherwomen of the Harbour
To understand Barangaroo you have to understand fishing, because that's where her power came from. In the coastal Eora world, women were the main food providers and fish was the staple. The men stood still in the shallows and speared fish with multi-pronged fish-gigs. The women went out on the water in bark canoes, called nowie, and fished with hook and line.
Karskens' essay "Barangaroo and the Eora Fisherwomen" for the Dictionary of Sydney paints the picture. The women twisted their lines, carr-e-jun, from the fibre of kurrajong, cabbage tree or flax, and sometimes from animal fur or grass "nearly as fine as raw silk". The crescent-shaped hooks, burra, were ground from the broadest part of a turban shell. Surgeon George Worgan reckoned these showed "the greatest ingenuity" of anything the Eora made. A small fire burned on a clay pad in the canoe for warmth and for cooking the catch, and the women sang and kept time with their paddles, often with a baby at the breast, in surf that the officers thought would frighten their toughest sailors.
Aiesha Saunders, writing for Museums of History NSW, adds the custom the Eora called malgun, in which the top joints of a girl's little finger were taken off in infancy. John Turnbull recorded that the joint was thrown into the sea "that the child may be hereafter fortunate in fishing". Not everyone agreed on the meaning. Governor Phillip thought that explanation "too trivial to be the real cause", and historian Keith Vincent Smith suggests it may have marked a girl promised in marriage.
Karskens argues that control of food meant status and power for these women. Fishing gear wasn't trinkets. Once the officers worked that out, they collected the hooks alongside spears, and convicts caught stealing fishing tackle were punished severely.
Meeting the Officers – Spring 1790
Barangaroo first appears in the records because of Bennelong. He and Colbee had been kidnapped at Manly in November 1789. Colbee escaped within weeks, and Bennelong got away in 1790. Then on 7 September 1790 Governor Phillip was speared at Manly Cove (my Manly post covers that day). In the weeks that followed the British were desperate to keep talking to Bennelong.
Tench describes a meeting on the north shore on 15 September 1790. Bennelong had been teasing the officers that his "old favourite, Barangaroo", had become "the wife of Colbee", and that he'd got "two large women" to make up for losing her. Now he admitted that the woman standing nearby was Barangaroo, and his wife. The girl Abaroo (Boorong), who was living in the settlement, was sent over to bring her in. Abaroo put a petticoat on her first. In Tench's words, "this was the prudery of the wilderness, which her husband joined us to ridicule, and we soon laughed her out of it", and the petticoat was dropped. At Bennelong's request the officers combed and cut her hair, which she seemed to enjoy. Wine she would not touch. She "turned from it with disgust", even with Bennelong urging her on.
Then came a moment that says a lot about her. The officers asked Abaroo to take Barangaroo aside and talk her into coming to Sydney. Tench admits it went the other way: "Barangaroo's arguments to induce Abaroo to rejoin their society, were more powerful than those of the latter". Abaroo came back to the boat reluctantly and sat "in sullen silence".
A few days later Tench found Bennelong and Barangaroo "shivering over a few lighted sticks", cooking small fish beside their canoe. The officers had brought back things that convicts had stolen from the Eora. Among them was a net full of fishing lines and tackle, which Barangaroo said was hers, and she slung it straight round her neck.
Karskens puts the first proper meeting a bit later, "on the north shore at Kirribilli in November 1790", and ties it to a huge haul by the British of about 4,000 Australian salmon, of which forty big fish were sent across to Bennelong's group as a present. Her theory is that Barangaroo was insulted. A fisherwoman winning her fish one at a time could see what it meant when white men handed food to Eora men by the netful: women would lose their hold on the food supply.
The Broken Fish-Gig
On 8 October 1790 a signal fire was lit and parties went over to meet Bennelong, Barangaroo and others. Soon afterwards Bennelong decided to cross to Sydney Cove and visit the Governor. Barangaroo was dead against it. Tench asked where she was and was told she had "violently opposed Baneelon's departure. When she found persuasion vain, she had recourse to tears, scolding, and threats, stamping the ground, and tearing her hair." Then "she snatched up in her rage one of his fish-gigs, and dashed it with such fury on the rocks, that it broke."
She had good reason to be scared. The last time Bennelong had stayed with the British he'd been taken by force and held prisoner. To settle her nerves the chaplain, Richard Johnson, stayed behind on the north shore with Abaroo as a hostage until Bennelong came back. When the boat returned, Tench found Johnson and Barangaroo sitting at the fire. She was making fish-hooks.
When Bennelong saw his broken fish-gig, Tench says, he gave her "a look of savage fury", and the officers had to step in. Once he calmed down, the tables turned. Barangaroo, "emboldened by our presence and the finery in which we had decked her", put on "a haughty demeanour" and refused his caresses.
Karskens adds that Barangaroo refused to let Bennelong go to Rose Hill (Parramatta) whenever he tried, and that he wasn't allowed on the April 1791 expedition to the Nepean. "When he hit her, she hit him back," she writes. The officers were puzzled, because the couple were also obviously fond of each other.
The Hard Side of the Record
We should be honest about the violence in these sources. Tench wrote that Eora men struck their wives on the head with whatever was in their hand, and that "Baneelon did the same to Barangaroo, but she was a scold and a vixen, and nobody pitied her". It's an ugly line from a man of his time, and it tells us as much about Tench as about her. David Collins also left a note in his papers that Bennelong had "severely beaten" her on the morning she gave birth.
Barangaroo could be fierce herself. In late 1790 Bennelong took part in an attack on a young woman, and Tench describes him visiting her afterwards in the hospital and promising her protection. Barangaroo, who had come with him, "began to revile them both with great bitterness, threw stones at the girl and attempted to beat her with a club."
The Flogging – May 1791
One of the best-known stories about Barangaroo comes from May 1791. A convict was caught stealing fishing tackle from Daringa, the wife of Colbee, and Governor Phillip had him flogged in front of a group of Eora men and women. It didn't go down the way he hoped. Tench wrote that there was "not one of them that did not testify strong abhorrence of the punishment and equal sympathy with the sufferer". Then: "Daringa shed tears, and Barangaroo, kindling into anger, snatched a stick and menaced the executioner." Tench summed the two women up as "the former was ever meek and feminine, the latter fierce and unsubmissive."
Karskens tells the same story slightly differently. She has the officers inviting Barangaroo to watch, and has her becoming "disgusted and furious" and trying "to grab the whip out of the flogger's hands".
Daringa and Barangaroo were close. Keith Vincent Smith writes that Daringa had exchanged names with Barangaroo and was styled "Daringa Barangaroo", and Collins calls Barangaroo "Ba-rang-a-roo Da-ring-ha" when he records her death. In Eora custom an exchanged name was a serious bond.
Dilboong
In 1791 Barangaroo had a baby girl. Karskens writes that Bennelong pushed for the birth to happen at Government House, so the child would belong to the new country, Sydney. Barangaroo said no. She gave birth on her own somewhere in the bush on the edge of the town.
Collins went quietly to see her a few hours later and was astonished. "To my great surprise she was walking about alone, and picking up sticks to mend her fire." The baby, "whose skin appeared to have a reddish cast", lay on a piece of soft bark on the ground. He watched her deal with the umbilical cord using a little kangaroo leg-bone that Bennelong had wrapped in punk and heated at the fire, and finally cut it with a shell.
The girl was called Dilboong. Collins says the name came from "a small bird, which we often heard in low wet grounds and in copses".
Death and Cremation
Barangaroo didn't live long after the birth. Karskens points out that "the officers were silent on why she died." Keith Vincent Smith dates her death to late 1791.
Collins was one of the few Europeans asked to be there at the end. Bennelong "determined at once to burn her", and asked Governor Phillip, Surgeon John White and Collins to attend. Bennelong's sister Carangarang came, along with several men and one or two other women. Collins describes the whole thing carefully. The ground was scraped back a few inches with a stick. A pyre about three feet high was built up from brushwood and twigs, with heavier wood on the sides, and covered with grass. Barangaroo's body, wrapped in an old blanket, was laid on it with her head to the north. Then "a basket with the fishing apparatus and other small furniture of the deceased was placed by her side". Bennelong laid logs over her, and the pyre was lit.
The next day Bennelong asked the officers back to watch him gather her ashes. He walked ahead "in a sort of solemn silence". With the end of a spear he raked "the calcined bones and ashes together in a heap", then shaped a mound over them with a piece of bark, smoothing every little bump, and set a log on each side. He asked them "if it was good". Collins, who often wrote harshly about the Eora, was moved. He said Bennelong's grief "seemed the result of an heartfelt affection for the object of it", and that he stood afterwards with his hands folded over his chest, deep in thought.
The spear in Bennelong's hand had a purpose. He blamed the carradhy (clever man or healer) Willemering, the same man who had speared Phillip, for not coming quickly enough to treat Barangaroo when she was ill. According to the Dictionary of Sydney, Bennelong later fought Willemering and wounded him in the thigh with that spear. Collins also wrote that Bennelong said "he should not be satisfied until he had sacrificed some one to her manes", meaning her spirit.
Where exactly were her ashes laid? Karskens says Bennelong "buried her ashes carefully in the garden of Government House". Collins records that baby Dilboong, who died only a few months later, was buried in the Governor's garden too, and that Bennelong slept near the spot afterwards.
Collins also noticed the way names were handled after a death. Colbee's wife, who "bore the same names as the deceased", gave them up and was called Bo-rahng-al-le-on. The same happened to a little settler girl whom Barangaroo had been so fond of that she always called her by her own name.
How Historians See Her Now
For a long time Barangaroo was a footnote in Bennelong's story, the "difficult" wife. Historians now read her differently. Karskens asks whether she was just a difficult woman and answers that "the answer may lie in fish and fishing". Barangaroo could see where life alongside the British led: dependence on men, black and white, and the loss of the women's control over food. Wikipedia sums up the modern view that historians have argued she was a matriarch of the Cammeraygal through her role as a fisherwoman.
Eora women kept fishing the harbour long after she was gone. Karskens says their canoes, with little plumes of smoke from the onboard fires, could still be seen until at least the late 1820s. She finishes her essay with a question: "where in Sydney Harbour, our paradise of waters, are the great Eora fisherwomen remembered?"
Barangaroo, the Place
Part of the answer now sits on the western edge of the CBD. The old East Darling Harbour wharf strip, the stretch of Hickson Road that wharfies called The Hungry Mile in the Depression, was given up as a port after container shipping moved away. In 2003 the NSW Government decided to redevelop it. After a design competition in 2005–06 and a public naming competition, Planning Minister Frank Sartor announced in October 2006 that the area would be called Barangaroo, and the Dictionary of Sydney dates the formal commemoration to 5 October 2007.
Some people have pointed out the irony. The Wikipedia article on Barangaroo notes that the precinct is "not located in her traditional lands". She was a north shore woman, and this is the south side of the harbour. The Barangaroo article also mentions that for a while the northern point was called Barangaroo Point, until the Geographical Names Board ruled that was wrong and brought back the historic name Millers Point.
Barangaroo Reserve
The best tribute is probably the headland park at the northern end. Barangaroo Reserve opened on 22 August 2015. It's a rebuilt headland, about six hectares, shaped on the pre-1836 shoreline that was cut away for wharves. It was designed by Johnson Pilton Walker with PWP Landscape Architecture. The foreshore is built from sandstone blocks quarried and cut on the site itself, and the park is planted with some 75,000 native trees, shrubs and plants. There's a cultural space called The Cutaway underneath it. The walk along the water is Wulugul Walk, and the big grassed area is the Walumil Lawns.
It's a lovely place to stand on a winter afternoon and watch the ferries. If you look across the water towards Balmain and Goat Island, you can just about picture a bark canoe with a little fire burning in it and a woman with a shell hook, singing as she fishes.
Timeline
- c.1750 – Barangaroo born, according to Wikipedia (no record exists; the officers guessed her age at about 40 in 1790).
- February 1788 – British officers meet Cameragal women at Manly. Karskens thinks Barangaroo was "very likely present".
- 1789 – Smallpox epidemic among the Eora. Barangaroo loses her first husband and two children.
- 25 November 1789 – Bennelong and Colbee kidnapped at Manly Cove (the Dictionary of Sydney gives 23 November).
- 7 September 1790 – Governor Phillip speared at Manly Cove.
- 15 September 1790 – Tench meets Barangaroo on the north shore: the petticoat, the haircut, the refused wine.
- October 1790 – Barangaroo breaks Bennelong's fish-gig when he crosses to visit the Governor.
- November 1790 – Karskens' date for the Kirribilli meeting and the gift of salmon.
- May 1791 – The flogging of a convict for stealing Daringa's fishing tackle. Barangaroo threatens the flogger with a stick.
- 1791 – Dilboong born in the bush. Barangaroo dies later in 1791, is cremated with her fishing gear, and her ashes are buried by Bennelong.
- After Barangaroo's death – Dilboong dies as a baby, only a few months old (Wikipedia), and is buried in the Governor's garden (Collins).
- 2003 – NSW Government decides to redevelop East Darling Harbour.
- 18 October 2006 – Frank Sartor announces the name Barangaroo.
- 5 October 2007 – Date the Dictionary of Sydney gives for the commemoration of the name.
- 22 August 2015 – Barangaroo Reserve opens.
Where the Sources Disagree
- When the officers first met her. Tench describes meeting her on the north shore on 15 September 1790. Wikipedia says October 1790. Karskens says "late 1790" and puts the key meeting at Kirribilli in November 1790.
- The flogging. Tench says she "snatched a stick and menaced the executioner". Karskens says she tried "to grab the whip out of the flogger's hands".
- What happened to her ashes. Collins describes Bennelong raking them into a carefully built mound. Karskens says he "buried her ashes carefully in the garden of Government House". Wikipedia says the ashes were "scattered" around Phillip's garden.
- Her first husband's death. Karskens says smallpox killed her husband and two children. Wikipedia says the husband "allegedly" died of smallpox.
- When the precinct was named. Wikipedia's article on Barangaroo the woman says the area was officially named in October 2006, the date of Sartor's announcement. The precinct article says it was "renamed in October 2007", and the Dictionary of Sydney gives 5 October 2007.
- Whose wife was she in 1790? Bennelong told Tench she had become "the wife of Colbee", and then later presented her as his own wife. Tench didn't know whether to believe him either time.
- Dilboong's dates. Wikipedia says Dilboong lived only a few months. Collins describes her being at the breast when her mother died and buried later in the Governor's garden, but I haven't found a firm date for her death in the sources I read.
My Earlier Posts
- Woolaware Bennelong
- Barangaroo – Maritime – Coastal – Inner Sydney
- The Rocks And Barangaroo
- Manly – From Kai'ymay and Phillip's 'Manly Cove' of 1788 to the Ferries, the Quarantine Station and the Surf
- The Sydney Opera House – From Cattle Point and Bennelong Point to Fort Macquarie and Utzon's Sails
- Bennelong Point – Circular Quay East
- First Government House – Corner of Bridge Street & Phillip Street
- Museum Of Sydney – Site Of Original Government House
- Sydney Cove – 1788
- Bungaree – The Broken Bay Man Who Sailed Around Australia with Flinders
- Cora Gooseberry – Queen Gooseberry – Widow of Bungaree
- Philip Gidley King – Third Governor of New South Wales
Sources
- Grace Karskens, "Barangaroo and the Eora Fisherwomen", Dictionary of Sydney, 2014 – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/barangaroo_and_the_eora_fisherwomen
- "Barangaroo" (person), Dictionary of Sydney – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/person/barangaroo
- Keith Vincent Smith, "Daringa", Dictionary of Sydney, 2011 – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/daringa
- Keith Vincent Smith, "Willemering", Dictionary of Sydney, 2016 – https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/willemering
- Aiesha Saunders, "A fisher woman of Warrane", Museums of History NSW, 2020 – https://mhnsw.au/stories/first-nations/a-fisher-woman-of-warrane/
- Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson (1793), Project Gutenberg – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3534
- David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1 (1798), Project Gutenberg – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12565
- F. D. McCarthy, "Colebee", Australian Dictionary of Biography (rev. 2025) – https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/colebee-1909
- "Barangaroo", Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barangaroo
- "Barangaroo, New South Wales", Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barangaroo,_New_South_Wales
- Images: Wikimedia Commons, as credited under each picture.