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 A
nn.
‘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)
‘Everything and everyone is connected to Jenny Graham. She’s a daughter of George Drumley or Darramlee. She seems to have borne her first child to Andrew Graham, a river pilot on the Southport Broadwater, in 1873; she married in 1898, and most of the Kombumerri claimants are descended from her surviving children. The entire Kombumerri Corporation for Culture are descendants of Jenny Graham.’
‘Did she have any direct connection with Numinbah?’
‘I can’t see that she did. She grew up in Beaudesert, which seems to have been the last stronghold of the Yugambeh speakers. Then she lived in Southport. Died in 1945. The most authoritative account of the Numinbah Aborigines has to be the one given by Jack Gresty in 1947, and he says that the local aborigines had died out twenty-five years earlier.’ (Gresty, 69)
Gresty, who worked for the Queensland Forestry Department, spent much of his time in Numinbah. He also had the benefit of information from William Duncan’s sons who were brought up with the local Aborigines and spoke their languages. I foraged in a drawer and pulled out a file: ‘This is Gresty’s version, “The real significance of the word ‘Numinbah’ was that the aborigines believed that the narrow valley held the mountains tightly together. The tribe had two highly prized hunting dogs; one was named ‘Numinbah’ – ‘hold him tight’ – and the other ‘Wundburra’ (‘Wunburra’) – ‘climb upwards’. ” ’ (Gresty, 60)
‘Is there any support for that?’ asked Ann.
‘Sharpe lists a word “naminbah” as meaning “hold on”, saying that it’s derived from “southern dialects”, and she gives two authorities as quoted in Science of Man in 1904, and doesn’t notice the occurrence in Gresty. And she doesn’t notice the geographical name either. Weird.’
I got up to put together the salad for our supper as Ann worked her way through Gresty’s word-list, which she was trying to compare with Sharpe’s. ‘I think there is a significant group of words for which Sharpe has no authority but Gresty, which would be Numinbah words rather than Nerang words, but the spelling is so peculiar it’s hard to be sure. Gresty is the only source for the names of some trees—’
I paused in the rinsing of the lettuce. ‘Such as?’
Ann read from the notes she had made, ‘Black Apple, Red Bean, Crow’s Ash, Native Elm, Red Carabeen, Black Myrtle, Pink Tulip Oak.’
‘Brilliant. All rainforest species, and none of them listed by any other informant. I’ve spent hours scanning the other Yugambeh/Bundjalung word lists and there’s only a few words that relate to rainforest. The trees they have names for are eucalypts, banksias, wattles; the animals are animals of the open forest.’
‘Well you did say that the Kombumerri called themselves “people of the dry forest”. That part makes sense at least.’
‘The problem is that the rainforest vocab might be missing because the compiler didn’t ask about rainforest species, not because the respondent didn’t have names for them. Still. It’s a clue. What’s the word given for Crow’s Ash?’
‘Um . . . “bulbar” – that’s Sharpe’s version of Gresty’s “bulburra”.’
‘Crow’s Ash is a Flindersia; the usual name given for the Flindersias is “cudgerie”, supposed to be from the Bundjalung “gajari”. Gresty’s word is completely different.’
Ann hunted through Sharpe as I laid the table.
‘Found it! Sharpe routinely changes “g” to “k”. She’s got an entry “kadhir”, which she says is a location name from a type of tree, “cudgery tree”. Her source supplies “Cudherygun where the cudgeree trees grow”. She expands that saying that it grows on a clear hill above Tyalgun, Murwillumbah area.’
‘Tyalgum, she means. Gresty gives her that word, for a fighting chieftain; she changes it to “dayalgam” and then says that “kayalgam” is the more likely form.’
‘And then spells the gazetted place-name wrong.’
Ann closed the book with a snap and we sat down to supper.
Early the next morning I brought Ann her morning cup of hot water and lemon, and asked her to come with me to the Natural Bridge. We left the car by the causeway, walked up through the rainforest along the creek, where in the dawn twilight we surprised a pademelon and her joey feeding on fallen fruit. At every step the roar of the water plunging through the hole in the roof of the cave grew louder. The air was clammy and dank. As we climbed up the path leading to the cave we could feel the ground shuddering beneath our feet. We stepped into the gloom of the cave. Ann wrapped her arms across her chest. I zipped my body-warmer up to my chin. We had no desire to creep under the guardrail, but stood motionless, awed by the white column of falling water and its reflection trembling on the black waters of the pool. The energy contained within the space is massive and utterly intimidating. Tourists however are seldom intimidated. As far as tourism is concerned the place is a mere curiosity.
As we walked out of the roar of the falling water and back down the creek, Ann shivered.
‘Disturbing, isn’t it?’
‘Definitely,’ said Ann.
I turned off the track and led Ann into the forest. I cautioned her to be careful round a group of young stingers. ‘See that?’
I was pointing at an anvil-shaped rock, with a smaller rock sitting on top of it. Ann pi
cked up the smaller rock. A black spider ran for its life.
‘It’s got a hole in the side that my thumb just fits into,’ she said. ‘And it’s dead flat.’
‘Rub it across the stone.’
She did, and a bright red streak was suddenly uncovered.
‘Ochre,’ she said. ‘Is there ochre round here?’
‘There is, but not this close to the creek. I’ve known about this stone since the first week I was here. Every time I come here I check it, and it’s always undisturbed. The black spider is always under the pestle.’
Ann stood up. ‘You think it’s a mortar and pestle. For grinding ochre. Body paint.’
‘The way I see it there’s simply no chance that Aboriginal people didn’t know about the waterfall, the cavern and the pool, or that they hadn’t invested the place with special significance. Groom says “The natives knew the place well and kept away from it.” [66] Deep as it is in the creek gorge, it would have been easy to keep secret from all but the initiated.’
‘Why would it need to be secret?’
‘Because it would have to be sacred. Think about the topography, the deep gorge, the joining arch of rock, the wide, low cavern, the thunderous shaft of water. It’s like an image of titanic intercourse.’
‘Or something,’ said Ann, looking back to the creek.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
She chanted, and I joined in:
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her daemon lover!
‘Coleridge would have got it,’ I said.
‘Coleridge was a junkie,’ said Ann.
‘I still reckon this is a sacred site,’ said I stubbornly.
I didn’t utter the words that were uppermost in my mind. ‘Secret women’s business’ are the most ridiculed three words in a nation given to ridiculing anything it cannot understand. In 1995 the struggle of Ngarrindjeri women to prevent a bridge being built from the mainland to Hindmarsh Island at the mouth of the Murray River was quashed by the finding of a Royal Commission that the evidence of the women was fabricated. In 2001, when the developers sought compensation for the cost of delays in building the bridge caused by the Indigenous people’s opposition, a Federal Court found for the women, who claimed that the island had a special significance as a burial ground. Then in December 2002 workmen laying cables for the redevelopment of the wharf at Goolwa dug up the skeletal remains of a Ngarrindjeri woman and her daughter. The secret was manifest in the topography if only the developers had had eyes to see. The last time I was there, there was no water under the bridge the whitefellas had been so desperate to build. The pleasure craft moored under it were locked in dried mud.
White Beech: The Rainforest Years Page 15