Bonyi Bush Books

" 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. Of this more anon.

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 that area in April 1842, and that was John Fahy.

Fahy was able to move quickly into the bush and turned north, and according to a later deposition: “….came to the Darling Downs with the drays…”. Once on the Downs, he joined up and was accepted into clan life. He was classified as an escapee the following month, and his description was published as : “….5 foot 9 inches, brown complexion, brown hair, brown eyes, small scar on right side of under lip, a mole and D under left arm, JF inside lower right arm, scar on left elbow, three scars on left knee…”

As an outsider, the Clan would be suspicious of this outsider, but his life was spared by one of the oldest chiefs of that Clan. “Lie down black fella, wake up white fella”, he was later to say explaining how he was thought to be the reincarnation of an old chief’s son that had been killed in battle. Over time he received that clan’s traditional body marking and scaring, and took the name, Gilburri ; the name according to Archibald Meston means Bellbird. These unmistakable Bora marks on his breast and left shoulder, clear proof that he had been through that ceremony, called Boorool in the Bunya country, and he referred to it in the most respectful and flattering terms. Boorool is the term used for man making ceremonies.

There is another explanation to the meaning of the name Gilburri from linguist, Des Crump at Queensland State Library. He looked at the Warwick/Gidhabal wordlists, and made the assement that gil/kil was the shortened for to die or be dead, while buri means to come back.This may well refer to Gilburri initially being sentenced to death by the Downs elders, and then saved by his adopted father ; so bought back from the dead. 14 Then in late 1842 or early in 1843, Fahy’s host clan on the Darling Downs, received an invitation to attend the Bunya Mountains gatherings and take part in the great festival. Fahy went with the clan, and once in the Bunya country met up with people from the Kabi Nation who adopted him in much the same way as Duramboi and Wandi had been years earlier- all in the same geographical Wide Bay area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilburri

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 many varieties, including large forms like the Native companion, the ibis, the forest turkey or bustard, and the emu. The country of the Wakka tribe is more level and open than that of the Kabi. It has little of the bunya and pine scrub.  Tindabalu, who was upwards of sixty years of age, and whose father belonged to the country about Gympie, told me that his father had told him, what had been handed down from his ancestors, that their people had come from the north along the coast.   

The Kabi were of low stature. The average would not exceed 5 feet 5 inches. In rare cases a height of about 6 feet was attained. The range would be from 5 feet I inch to 6 feet. In proportion to the men the women were rather tall. The people were light in the bone. The Lower part of the limbs was usually fine. The thighs, much more rarely the calves of the legs, were well developed. The muscles of the back and breast were often prominent. In walking, the head was thrown back. The hair of the head was luxuriant and wavy, it was very fine, sometimes glossy, sometimes dull, and in most cases it appeared black to the casual observer.   The beard was abundant and the breast was usually hirsute. Two men, Tommy Cain, a Kabi black, and Waruin, whose mother was Kabi and his father Wakka, had hair so pronouncedly curly as to be fitly termed at least frizzy, if not woolly. Strange, the lips of the latter were unusually thick and his nose more negroid than the general cast. His mother had not these peculiarities, so that he apparently inherited them from his Wakka ancestry. Of all the blacks I knew, he was the most good-natured, the best-tempered and the happiest, always smiling and very frequently laughing uproariously. He was indulgent to his wife and very kind to his horse.   ________________ 

LEADERSHIP    The Kabi tribe had no recognized chief. Courage, intelligence, and seniority gave a preponderating influence to their possessors. There were two or three men in the tribe, about equal inpower, who directed the movements of the whole, controlled the relations with neighbouring tribes, took care that established customs should not be infringed, and exercised & fatherly interest in domestic matters. They were men of acknowledged courage, whose influence and prowess seemed both hereditary. One of them, as a rule, espouse the cause of a weaker brother who was being maltreated. Property such as they possessed was respected. If a man foundd bees ' nests, and did not wish to rob it for some time he would mark the tree by pulling up the grass around the base,placing sticks against it, and so forth. It was & crime to rob a nest thus indicated. Quarrels were settled mostly by the arbitrariness of the kathar or club.

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.