Woollarawarre Bennelong’s grave could not be more underwhelming, given all the myth and drama attached to his short life as the most renowned and, perhaps, misunderstood Indigenous man in the first three decades of Australia’s post-invasion settlement.

Bennelong was a warrior and a peacemaker for a time held captive in chains by his European dispossessors. He took the pragmatic path of becoming an envoy for the Gadigal of Sydney to the invaders.

Bennelong’s burial site to be turned into public memorial Read more

He was a husband and a father, a man who clung to his culture despite the ravages of colonialism and a diplomat of sorts who, with another Indigenous man, became the first of this continent’s Aboriginal people to travel to England.

He developed friendships – out of necessity, certainly, but they apparently came to be infused by genuine warmth – with Europeans on his country, not least the first governor, Arthur Phillip, and the former soldier, convict and brewer James Squire. He was complex, articulate and politically savvy.

Yet for more than two centuries the grave he shares with his second wife, Booring, and probably another man, Nanbaree, had lain unmarked, largely forgotten, at Putney in Sydney’s north-west, on land once the orchard of his friend, the equally enigmatic Squire. Indeed, for almost a century until 2011, its precise location had eluded Australia – not unlike the true legacy of Bennelong, who has, in death, been straightjacketed as the subject of a black-white colonial morality tale: the Indigenous man straddling two worlds, inevitably toppling into the divide, dying as an obstreperous drunk having surrendered cultural agency.

The truth, thanks to some contemporary historians and others affording long-overdue dimension to Bennelong’s life, is much more complex and nuanced.

And so, while the commonwealth gears up to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the arrival in Botany Bay of James Cook’s HM Bark Endeavour, it transpires that the New South Wales government is also focusing on Bennelong, revealing on Sunday that it has spent almost $3m in a semi-secret off-market deal to buy the suburban house in whose front yard (or close to it) he and the others are buried. A project committee comprising state, federal and local MPs of varying political persuasion and, critically, Indigenous elders, wants to transform the home into a memorial to celebrate Bennelong for all his remarkable complexity, and a museum/education centre to commemorate the impact of European invasion and frontier war on Sydney’s Indigenes. There is even a plan to regrow part of Squire’s orchard in the backyard. While the government has paid for the actual property, a community group comprising Aboriginal and non-Indigenous members has now set about raising $1.2m to transform it.

It’s an ambitious project that aligns with a new momentum to re-examine elements of early invasion-frontier experience free from the colonial and racial binaries that have distracted generations of Australian historians, including the most eminent.

The name Bennelong – like that of his first wife, Barangaroo – is familiar throughout Australia, especially in Sydney. It has been bestowed upon the finger of harbour on which the Sydney Opera House stands and where Bennelong once lived; a federal electorate; a small crustacean and a suburban park close to where the man is buried. For a while it was adopted by a now-defunct, ultra-conservative thinktank dedicated to Indigenous policy – a nod, perhaps, to the purported allegorical prescience Bennelong’s supposed tragedy might have augured for the later Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to which the group prescribed its often reactionary, top-down criticisms and remedies.

When commemorating Captain Cook, we should remember the advice he ignored | Paul Daley Read more

Yes, Bennelong’s name is well known. But his “story”, as the hack workers of history – journalists – insist on calling a life’s experience, is little understood.

Several times in the past year, I’ve caught the RiverCat ferry from my place up towards Parramatta and alighted at Kissing Point, searching for some sense of the place where Bennelong lived the last decade and more of his life. Kissing Point – so named, supposedly, because it’s where in the river at low tide the keels of the early, heavily laden boats would first kiss the bottom, or where the second colonial governor of NSW, John Hunter, might have kissed his wife – rises from a long gradual rock ledge upon which the snapper fed and where the Wallumedegal harvested them. It climbs into what was once fertile land, home to Indigenous flora and fauna for millennia before being tamed and carved into settlers’ farmlets and orchards. From the ferry pontoon it’s a short stroll to Watson Street, Putney – an early agricultural part of the Sydney settlement whose kerbs are today punctuated with leisure boats, its daytime symphony one of power saws and nail guns singing in a suburb transitioning to newer money, and castles of glass and steel.

Watson Street ends in a cul-de-sac – Cleves Park – that is lush with lawn, under canopies of mature eucalypts. At its foot is a small concrete memorial dedicated to Bennelong, erected by the Bicentennial Authority in 1988. It’s a throwback to that divisive Australian moment when Indigenous people protested in their thousands against the ostentatious 200th birthday celebration of British invasion and colonisation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A simple plaque marks Bennelong’s burial site in Putney, Sydney, at the end of Watson Street and on the edge of Cleves Park. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

The grave is actually about 100 metres west of the monument, near the intersection of Watson Street and Horden Avenue. It is partially on the corner of the front yard of 25 Mitchell Street, a private house passed in at auction some months ago, and the unpaved verge under the canopy of some gnarly mature conifers. While the residents of Putney – and many previous owners of the house – have known the grave’s whereabouts, Bennelong’s burial spot has (at least partially) served as a thoroughfare for most of the past century. I’ve unwittingly walked over it several times.

The metaphoric resonance of this seems irresistible, not least in light of the plaque on the memorial at the end of Watson Street. It reads:

Bennelong was an Aborigine who befriended the first colonists, lived for a while as Governor Phillip’s guest and visited England where he became the toast of society. Following his death, he was buried hereabouts beside his wife and Nanbaree another Aborigine.

It defines Woollarawarre Bennelong (whose first name has its genesis in “wallumai”, the snapper fish of the Wallumedegal, on whose land he is buried – even though his own people, the Wangal, lived on the other, southern side of today’s Parramatta River) according to his relationship with the British empire. It also makes an assertion, pregnant with falsehood (though doubtless intentional and difficult to dismiss as being merely of its epoch given the Aboriginal land rights movement in the 1980s) about just who was host to whom.

Anyway, this was the trope still assigned to Bennelong in 1988. It has evolved little in public consciousness since then. And to determine how we got here, it is helpful to start at the end of the life of Bennelong, who lived from about 1764 to 3 January 1813.

A Sydney Gazette obituary for Bennelong, soon after his death, reads:

Bennelong died on Sunday morning last at Kissing Point. Of this veteran champion of the native tribe little favourable can be said. His voyage to and benevolent treatment in Great Britain produced no change whatever in his manners and inclinations, which were naturally barbarous and ferocious. The principal officers of government had for many years endeavoured, by the kindest of usage, to wean him from his original habits and draw him into a relish for civilised life; but every effort was in vain exerted and for the last few years he has been but little noticed. His propensity for drunkenness was inordinate; and when in that state he was insolent, menacing and overbearing. In fact, he was a thorough savage, not to be warped from the form and character that nature gave him by all the efforts that mankind could use.

In 2009 the Aboriginal heritage historian Emma Dortins, one of the contemporary historians at the vanguard of reassessing Bennelong’s experience, wrote of how the fabric of “Bennelong’s tragedy is a closely woven web of veracities; historical, allegorical, literary and moral”:

The threads are not easy to disentangle, but in the light of a body of evidence for the varied fortunes and strong relationships of Bennelong’s last 18 years, it is clear that we must reflect further on his story and on its uses. Tragedy is not life, or history, but a dramatic or literary genre with its own logic and genealogy. If Bennelong’s life is ‘tragic’, then it is storytellers who have made it so.

Indeed, tragedy is not life – just as life equates to far more than story.

But, for more than two centuries, Bennelong’s life has in history and literature, journalism, in stage and screen drama, and even dance, been captive to a trope that pretty much fits the paradigm of the Sydney Gazette’s obituary, unflattering and defined by tragedy.

The novelist Eleanor Dark’s 1966 entry on Bennelong in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (he was a principal character in her 1941 novel, The Timeless Land) gives him short shrift, from his capture by Phillip’s soldiers in November 1789, his development of a taste for liquor, going with Phillip to England in 1792 “where he was presented to King George III”, to returning to Sydney in 1795. There is no evidence that the royal court received Bennelong.

The ADB says Bennelong “could no longer find contentment or full acceptance either among his countrymen or the white men”.

It adds:

Two years later he had become ‘so fond of drinking that he lost no opportunity of being intoxicated, and in that state was so savage and violent as to be capable of any mischief’. In 1798 he was twice dangerously wounded in tribal battles. A censorious paragraph in the Sydney Gazette records his death at Kissing Point on 3 January 1813.

The ADB is in the process of compiling a new volume of Indigenous biography that will do Bennelong greater justice.

Dark certainly headed the Australian vanguard of her epoch when it came to shedding light on the colonial shadows. Her novel was remarkable in its literary elegance and for its groundbreaking historical research that promoted understanding of European invasion and the complex interracial relations that followed, among both regular readers and eminent historians including Manning Clark. It was most enlightened for its day. But ultimately it did Bennelong no great service. Clark’s own writings about Bennelong, informed in part by Dark, were no more progressive, at least in the context of what is now known about the Wangal man.

Bennelong lived for 18 years after returning from England, most of them as the head of what was known as the Kissing Point tribe on Squire’s land at Putney. But those almost two decades have mostly been omitted from so many historical and dramatic versions of his life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In December 1789 Phillip, under orders from the crown to ‘open dialogue with the natives’ sent his redcoats to capture some Aboriginal men. Phillip’s men took by force Bennelong and Colebee at Kai’ymay – today’s Manly Cove. Photograph: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

Another contemporary historian, Keith Vincent Smith, writes:

Bennelong did not fade into obscurity in the second part of his life after his return from England in 1795. He resumed a traditional Aboriginal lifestyle, regained authority as a leader, remarried and had a son. He died at the age of 50 as a respected elder mourned by his people.

The writing of Vincent Smith, together with that of the historians Dortins and Kate Fullagar, has brought to Australian historiography a much fuller version of the life of Bennelong which will – now that the memorial/museum at Watson St, Putney, is definitely proceeding – be shared with a broader Australian audience, black and non-Indigenous.

Jody Orcher, a Barkindji woman, member of the project committee and cultural heritage expert, says: “We as Australians need to recognise our frontier Aboriginal warriors and heroes as of national significance. Bennelong was the first Aboriginal diplomat to work with British government providing cultural knowledge of country, culture and lifestyle. Governor Phillip did acknowledge the cultural practices demonstrated from Bennelong and the Cadigal traditional owners.”

She says the foods identified by Bennelong for the Europeans ensured their survival in the earliest years of the colony.

Australia on a plate: recognising Indigenous rights to bush food Read more

“What I see though, as an Aboriginal person, is no visual commemoration of any of our Aboriginal frontier warriors or heroes ... throughout Sydney. The Bennelong Putney Project is the journey towards a recognition of the truth of respecting Australian Aboriginal history and sovereignty, right here in Sydney acknowledging two histories as one story for Australia.”

In the process of building the memorial/museum, she says, Bennelong’s grave should neither be disturbed nor identified, to avoid vandalism.

It is envisaged that items from public institutions and private collections throughout Australia would be loaned to the Bennelong facility. They would include one thing in the possession of the Sydney’s Waterhouse racing dynasty: a small metallic item that encapsulates so much of the critical early history involving Bennelong and Phillip.



In December 1789 Phillip, under orders from the crown to “open dialogue with the natives”, sent his redcoats to capture some Aboriginal men. A previous captive, Arabanoo, had died in the smallpox epidemic that swept through the fledgling colony earlier that year. Phillip’s men took by force Bennelong and Colebee at Kai’ymay – today’s Manly Cove – chained them and transferred them back to the Sydney settlement. Colebee escaped but Bennelong stayed for several months, during which he and the governor became acquainted. They shared language and began to understand elements of their respective cultures. Bennelong rejoined his people (his abduction had separated him from his wife, Barangaroo) after a few months.

While in Phillip’s company Bennelong had also befriended the first fleet officer Henry Waterhouse. Waterhouse gave Bennelong a small metal penknife, which he took back to his people. It was among the first metal objects the Cadigal around Manly owned. They turned it into a spearhead.

In 1790 Phillip and a group of his men went to Manly Cove, perhaps at the behest of Bennelong. Members of various Eora tribes were feasting on a beached whale. According to Indigenous oral accounts and European histories, Bennelong had sent the governor a piece of whale meat with an invitation for him to come to Kai’ymay. Another man, Willemering, speared Phillip through the shoulder, perhaps so he could atone for the kidnapping of Bennelong and Colebee.

This encounter is freighted with immense significance for early black/white relations. It implies Bennelong’s complicity in the trap (if that’s what it was) for Phillip – but also his understanding that the spearing would not be fatal. Conversely there are ongoing suggestions that Phillip and his men had secreted arms and were ready to shoot when the governor was struck. Regardless, the Kai’ymay mob allowed Phillip and his men to escape – had they wanted to kill them all, they could have easily done so.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In 1792 Bennelong and another Aboriginal man, Yemmerrawanne, travelled to England with the ailing Phillip. They were time travellers between the world’s oldest civilisation and industrial modernity, as pioneering as the first astronauts. Photograph: Alamy

The spear that struck Phillip might well have been made with the blade from the knife Waterhouse had given Bennelong months before. Waterhouse broke the shaft of the spear so Phillip could escape by boat back to the penal settlement. He recovered. Waterhouse kept the broken spear.

Today Rob Waterhouse, the great-great-great-great grandson of Henry, explains: “Henry gave Bennelong the knife. So Phillip, that day at Manly, was effectively hoist by his own petard. We have said we would be very happy to have it put on display [at a Bennelong museum] at Putney.”

Rob’s sister, Louise Waterhouse, explains:

After Henry broke the shaft of the spear that had wounded Governor Phillip, Henry carried the governor to their boat where it was at first thought he was mortally wounded. The governor wanted to give his last wishes. Fortunately, on the boat the doctor was able to carefully take the remaining spear out of the governor’s shoulder proclaiming he would indeed live – at which time young Henry managed to take the spearhead as a souvenir and attach it to his notebook account of the incident. Henry had a close relationship with Bennelong which started at the time when Bennelong lived with the governor at the early government house – which is evidenced by his [Bennelong’s] asking for him when the governor went to meet him at Manly beach [and] giving Henry a hug and a kiss at that encounter (we believe emulating Henry as a Ladies’ man!).

She says the knife blade “is the first tangible item showing the integration of the European settler’s technical items into their own [Indigenous] practices”.

Phillip, realising the nature of the retributive justice that had beset him, did not retaliate against his spearing at Manly. Instead he built Bennelong a hut on the point where Sydney Opera House now stands, where Bennelong lived periodically, learnt English and adopted some European habits and customs, all the while trying to enhance European understanding of – and relations with – his people in the name of preservation.

In 1792 Bennelong and another Aboriginal man, Yemmerrawanne, travelled to England with the ailing Phillip. Contextualised against the times of dispossession, disease and growing violence against the Eora, theirs was a remarkable investment of faith that Phillip would, actually, ensure they returned to country from England. They were time travellers between the world’s oldest civilisation and industrial modernity, as pioneering as the first astronauts.

In London they stayed for a time with Henry Waterhouse’s father, William, who paid for their tailored clothes, introduced them to society and facilitated their sightseeing.

In her 2009 essay, Bennelong in Britain, Kate Fullagar writes:

Bennelong lived at a number of addresses, toured key sites like St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London, visited museums, attended theatre performances, enjoyed urban spas, and even took in a session of the trial of Warren Hastings at the Houses of Parliament. About one year into his residence, Bennelong’s fellow Aboriginal travelling companion, the teenaged Yemmerawanne, died from a chest infection. Bennelong shouldered the supervision, and grief, of Yemmerawanne’s burial, after which he evidently felt it was time to go home. He finally managed to secure a berth back in February 1795, docking at Port Jackson in September – nearly three years after leaving his homeland.

Historians have long assumed, writes Fullagar, that the exotic Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne made a significant impact on England. But, she writes:

Relative to Indigenous travellers from other parts of the New World who had arrived in earlier decades, Bennelong stirred next to no interest from British authorities, dignitaries, or ordinary folk.

After his return to Australia, Bennelong maintained sporadic contact with the colonial government, dining with its officials and drinking their grog. Many of the earliest records suggest he had a drinking problem. It is telling, however, that his drinking was not viewed as problematic when he was imbibing with English aristocrats or at the governor’s table (several early governors were, by today’s standards, alcoholics). Indeed, in a colony occupied by white drunkards whose economy had as one of its chief currencies rum, Bennelong’s penchant for strong drink was hardly exceptional or the only potentially damaging custom that became transcultural. Yet it is the drinking that has been such a seminal and disproportionate part of the Bennelong narrative for so many who have written about him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 25 Watson Street, Putney, the burial site of Bennelong. The Bennelong Putney Project plans to turn the property into a museum and education centre. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Bennelong went to Kissing Point, where the orchardist and brewer Squire welcomed him. Squire had been a foundation member of what became the United States Army, having elected to serve in the military upon transportation from England to America in 1774. He initially served in the Maryland colonial militia, defending the North American colony against the French and the Native American tribes. He learned significantly from his contact with the North American Indigenes. This served him well for his later transportation to NSW in 1787 for stealing 10 roosters and hens.

After completing his sentence in NSW, Squire was granted 33 acres where Putney stands today. He rapidly expanded his holding, establishing orchards and his brewery that serviced travellers taking the river to the secondary settlement of Parramatta. He befriended the locals, including Bennelong, who, by late in the century, headed the area’s tribe.

In 2011 the environmental scientist Peter Mitchell located Bennelong’s grave on behalf of Ryde council by cross-referencing historical texts, photographs, maps, independent surveying and ground-penetrating radar work. Mitchell is now on the Bennelong Putney Project committee – along with the elders Des, Allen and Charles Chika Madden and Ray Davidson, the former federal Liberal MP Peter King, the Ryde mayor, Jerome Laxale, and the local NSW lower house parliamentarian, Anthony Roberts.

“His legacy has never been adequately appreciated because of the appalling job history did on him,” Mitchell says of Bennelong. “Towards the end of his life, Bennelong was fond of alcohol and some famous authors of history overemphasised that to the point where an image of a drunken Aboriginal man coloured all aspects of his life until recently.

“In recent years, enormous efforts have been made to correct that history. Buying the property where he is buried and turning it into a museum about him and the Indigenous people of the region will further help to rectify that wrong.”