White Beech: The Rainforest Years (20 page)

In 1894 in a letter to the editor of the
Brisbane Courier
(21 July) Meston recounted how, in 1868, when he was seventeen, he made a pioneering journey up the Nerang and over the Darlington Range ‘accompanied by a then well-known aboriginal called “Tullaman,” one of the Talgiburri tribe, a fine, athletic specimen of a man.’ Pioneer settler Edmund Harper responded to Meston’s article, correcting his version of Tullaman’s name, supplying it instead as ‘Tulongmool’, the ‘Talgiburri’ reference being allowed to stand (
Q
, 1 September, 410). Harper, who lived and worked with Aboriginal people, is supposed to have been fluent in a number of Aboriginal dialects. Unusually, he acknowledged a son, Billy, by an Aboriginal woman (
BC
, 28 June 1894). In a reply to Harper (
Q
, 22 September, 549) Meston repeated that Tullaman was what the Talgiburri man was always called by whites, and that, like many Aboriginal men, he worked for the cedar-getters; ‘he was one of the best axemen in the district, and as a log squarer had no superior’. Meston refers to the Talgiburri again in one of the articles he wrote in 1923 for
The Queenslander
on the ‘Lost Tribes of Moreton Bay’ (14 July, 18):

There were some fine men and women among the ‘Talgiburri’ and ‘Chabbooburri’ tribes of Nerang but today they are extinct. Among the Talgiburri at that time was a young Talgiburri black, about 20 years of age, very expert with the boomerang (bargann), the shield, and nulla.

This was none other than ‘Lumpy Billy’, so called because he had some kind of tumour on his face. He was also known as ‘Yoocum Billy’ because, as he spoke Yugambeh, he used the word ‘yugam’ for ‘no’. His blackfella name was ‘Dilmiann’. In the 1880s he eked out a living giving boomerang displays outside Brisbane pubs (
BC
, 2 October 1928 and 25 March 1931).

For months I puzzled over Meston’s ‘Talgiburri’. I was almost ready to give up when an interesting document turned up on line. It was called ‘Turnix Report 179’ and it dealt with cultural heritage issues involved in the potential development of Bahr’s Scrub, which is part of Logan City. The report, written by archaeologist Eleanor Crosby, discussed what might be the identity of the traditional owners of the scrub, and how a group might call itself one thing, and be called another by its neighbours. The example she chose was that of the Kombumerri who called themselves in Meston’s version ‘Talgiburri’ and in Margaret Sharpe’s ‘Dalgaybara’, the people of the ‘dalgay’ or dry forest. It seemed obvious to me that Talgiburri (with a hard ‘g’) was cognate with Dalgaybara, the same word with slightly different voicing. Sharpe also thinks ‘dalgay’ means ‘dry’ as in ‘dead’, when I reckon the word is used the same way botanists use it now. Dry forest is sclerophyll forest.

I explained this to Ann: ‘The Kombumerri called themselves people of the dry forest; Bullum called them mangrove-worm-eaters; they have since described themselves as “saltwater people”.’ (O’Connor) ‘I can’t find anything to connect them to rainforest.’

‘Have you spoken to any of the Kombumerri?’ asked Ann.

‘When I met Uncle Graham Dillon Kombumerri at a Griffith University do, I asked him about Natural Bridge. He murmured the words “borderline” and “disputed” and then changed the subject altogether.’

Uncle Graham was then CEO of Kalwun Development Corporation, which is named for the Albert Lyrebird, that can live nowhere but in montane rainforest. The corporation runs twice-daily Paradise Dreaming Tours that take their clients to the Merrimac burial ground, to the Bora ring at Burleigh, then around the Burleigh Mountain to a midden and then to the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service HQ to see a cultural dance. Natural Bridge is not on their itinerary.

‘Every map I look at shows something different. This map was drawn by Faith Baisden for the Kombumerri Corporation in the 1990s.’ (Sharpe, 1998, xiv) ‘It’s partly based on the map supplied with the vocabulary collected from Bullum in 1913. It’s supposed to show “Yugambeh clan areas”. I always thought Yugambeh was a language, but here it is being used for a people.’

‘I realise that we don’t use the word “tribe” any more,’ said Ann. ‘Is that just political correctness or what?’

‘I think it’s more just correctness. The Yugambeh peoples are exogamous, I think. They had to marry out of their own clans, so there was a constant interchange between clans. The clans are not in competition with each other, though they did stage stereotyped combats of different kinds on special occasions. So it’s wrong to describe them as tribes. Still, lots of people do, including Aboriginal people.’ (Powell and Hesline, 116)

I sipped my wine while Ann studied the map. She shook her head. ‘It shows the Kombumerri on the lower Nerang, nowhere near Natural Arch. Or Bridge or whatever the dickens it’s called. We’re here, right?’

Ann pointed to a dotted area on the map that extended southwards from the heads of the Nerang River and Tallebudgera Creek, deep into the Mount Warning caldera. It included the Natural Bridge and was labelled ‘Birinburra’.

She went on. ‘That’s pretty straightforward. All you have to do is find the Birinburra.’

‘If this map was correct the Birinburra would have to be leaping up and down the ring dykes of the caldera like chamois. Most of that country is downright uninhabitable. The people who were said to live on the south side of the northern rim of the caldera were the Tul-gi-gin. That’s according to Joshua Bray, who arrived in the Tweed in 1863. I would have said Talgiburri are the same as Tul-gig-in, the root word is “talgi-” or “tulgi-”, cognate with “dalgay”, while “-gin” is a plural, and “-burri” is a version of “-bara” or “-burra”. With Australian ethnolinguists, nothing is that easy. Margaret Sharpe persists in thinking “tulgi-” is the name of an unidentified species of tree, even though she lists Talgiburri as a version of Dalgaybara.’

‘Who’s Margaret Sharpe?’

‘She’s the acknowledged expert on the Yugambeh language. She began recording language at Woodenbong in the Sixties and she’s been working on it ever since.’

Arthur Groom (
ADB
) who came to Numinbah in the 1920s used the name ‘Brinburra’ for the Kombumerri themselves. He wrote in 1949 that ‘between the Wangerriburras and the coast, the smaller Nerang or Kombumerri tribe, sometimes known as Brinburra, was hemmed within a walled valley; but these people wandered round the foothills as far as the base of Mount Warning.’ Groom would be very surprised to learn that his small Kombumerri group now claims the whole Gold Coast from the Logan to the Tweed.

‘Here’s another map, based on accounts given to a student called Hausfeldt in the Fifties by people from Woodenbong. The whole caldera and all the land east of the Nerang River is shown as territory of the “Nerangbul”. The “Minyungbal” are shown as occupying all the land between the Nerang River and the Albert, and all the land between the Albert and the Logan is labelled “Yukumbear”.’ (Hausfeldt)

‘What a mess,’ said Ann. ‘On the Kombumerri Corporation map the Minjungbal are shown at the mouth of the Tweed, and on Hausfeldt’s map there are no Minjungbal, only Minyungbal way further inland and way further north, right up to the mouth of the Logan.’

‘Which doesn’t make sense because, according to Sharpe, the Minjungbal and the Minyungbal are the same people.’ (1998, 2)

‘Did you say Sharpe started work in Woodenbong? The Kombumerri Corporation map doesn’t go that far west.’

‘I know. These days the Woodenbong people call themselves Githabul, and don’t call their language Bundjalung or even Yugambeh. Sharpe believes in a Bundjalung dialect chain, but the Githabul emphatically deny that any such thing exists. Tourism Queensland might say that the natural bridge is in the territory of the local Kombumerri Aboriginal people, but I still don’t know why they think the Kombumerri are local.’

‘So if the custodians are not Kombumerri what would they be?’

‘North of the stateline you hear only of Kombumerri. They never mention the Bundjalung and the Bundjalung never refer to them. According to the Bundjalung Elders Council Aboriginal Corporation’s website, the Bundjalung arrived from far northern Australia somewhere around 6000
bc
and occupied the region extending from the Logan River in Queensland to as far south as the Clarence River in northern New South Wales and west to the Great Dividing Range.’

Ann was astonished. ‘But that means they both claim the Gold Coast! The Kombumerri must be a part of the Bundjalung.’

‘Which is why I toddled off to Tweed Heads to talk to the people at the Minjungbal Centre. The people involved in reviving the language of the Kombumerri now deny that Yugambeh is part of the same language group even.’ (Best and Barlow, 11)

‘Wait a minute,’ said Ann, who had Norman Tindale’s map of the distribution of Australian tribes at the time of contact unfolded on the table. ‘Tindale has the “Badjalang” much further down the coast. Between the “Jugambe” and the Badjalang there are the “Arakwal”, the “Widjabal”, the “Katibal” and the “Minjungbal”, and their territories are all roughly the same size. Tindale certainly thought the Yugambeh were just one tribe among many. The people he puts in Numinbah are the “Kalibal”.’

Tindale’s Catalogue of Australian Aboriginal Tribes calls the Kalibal ‘a rainforest frequenting people’ with a territory based on the McPherson Range, extending north from near Unumgar in New South Wales to Christmas Creek in Queensland, east to the Upper Nerang Valley and south to Mount Cougal and the Tweed Range, Tyalgum and the Brunswick River divide.

‘So we’re in Kalibal country. Where does that leave the Birinburra?’

‘I think Birinburra has to be another name for the same people. Clans have self names that they use for themselves, while other clans call them by different names.’

For some time I had been really puzzled to find that the word ‘birin’ in various spellings kept turning up where I didn’t expect it. In his book
Wollumbin
, Norman Keats included among the Bundjalung dialects and their speakers ‘Birhin/Birhinbal’. To my surprise these people turned out to be swamp-dwellers who lived south-east of Casino, along the Summerland Way and westward to beyond Rappville. Keats remarks ruefully, ‘Little is known of the Birhin people in general.’ In L. P. Winterbotham’s account of the recollections of Gaiarbau, the last man of the Jinibara who was born in Kilcoy way to the north, Gaiarbau lists ‘the Jukambe (Jugambeir), the Jagarbal (Jugarabul) and the Kitabel (Gitabal) tribes, who together were known as Biri:n people’. Suddenly I knew what ‘birin’ meant and why I would never find a clan calling itself by that name. It simply meant ‘south’ or ‘southern’ (Sharpe, 1998). Among the people called southern by the Queensland clans living north of the McPherson Range were the Kalibal.

‘What do we know about the Kalibal?’ asked Ann.

‘That they’re sometimes spelt Galibal. That’s about it. They’re supposed to have hunted pademelons, possums and birds, and used Bangalow Palm fronds as water containers and the fibres of stingers to make nets, but I don’t know what the hard evidence is for that. From the 1840s they were made to pick out the best stands of Hoop Pine and Red Cedar for the timber-getters, but by the 1870s settlers had driven them off the land altogether and they were reduced to living in camps. I reckon they’d see themselves as a clan of the Githabul.’

‘So they’re way to the west of Natural Bridge?’

‘As of now their territory begins on the western side of the caldera and Natural Bridge is on the north face of the northern side, but Tindale, who worked on his map from the 1920s until it was published in 1974, gives the Kalibal the whole Mount Warning caldera and Numinbah.’

‘Which means that Kalibal territory straddles the border,’ said Ann, ‘which is what you would expect, no?’

The area called Numinbah is shaped like an hourglass with the top in Queensland and the bottom in New South Wales and the Numinbah Gap at its narrowest part. It extends northwards from the north bank of the Rous River in New South Wales through the Numinbah Gap to the junction of Pine Creek with the Nerang River in Queensland. The single name certainly suggests a single people.

‘What does Numinbah mean?’

‘A blackfella called Numinbah Johnnie is supposed to have told Frank Nixon, the first white settler, that it meant place of devils. I reckon he was just trying to put him off.’

Numinbah Johnny, known to his own people as Bulgoojera, was real enough. He was said to be ‘a smart fellow’ who ‘could do mental arithmetic to the astonishment and sometimes to the discomfiture of the white timber-getters’. Two of Bulgoojera’s sons were fine athletes. The boys ended up at Deebing Creek mission station, where they died of tuberculosis (Gresty, 62). Nobody seems to know what became of their father.

‘The Kombumerri Aboriginal Corporation for Culture says that in Yugambeh “Numinbah” means “shelter”.’

‘What does Sharpe say?’

Ann fetched the
Dictionary of Yugambeh
. ‘She doesn’t have any word meaning “shelter”. She says “nyamin” means small palm tree or “midjim”.’

‘Midyim is certainly the Yugambeh name for the Walking-stick Palm, which is endemic to the Numinbah Valley. If that’s the root of the name, it should be Nyuminbah.’

Ann worked her way back and forth between the word-list and the sources. ‘It isn’t Nyumminbah, is it?’ She was beginning to sound testy. ‘All this high-handed re-spelling is getting me down. The only source Sharpe gives is W. E. Hanlon, who collected words from pre-existing records and from Jenny Graham.’ (Sharpe, 1998, 145, Hanlon)