Aboriginal Ancestry - In the beginning - Dreamtime

The DREAMTIME or the DREAMING relate to the deep seated beliefs of the First People of Australia concerning the ancestral creation of their land and all the things within it — the plants, the animals, the landscape features and of course the people themselves. This makes their spiritual past an integral part of their surroundings and an active part of their present existence. Their concept of time is fundamentally different to that of non-Aboriginal Australians who see time simply as a linear succession. The Aboriginal view is that time consists of a ‘spiral’ where the past is interwoven with the present and is an essential part of the present. Consequently, when debating the issues of Reconciliation, we should bear in mind these fundamentally different concepts of time.

"Nerang itself, takes its name from an Aboriginal word
NEERUNG, meaning shovelnose shark"

The following story, is a tragic love story  — A Nerang River Love Story — that was told to Hilma Dillon by her grandmother, Ginny Graham (see her story in Rory O’Connor’s (1997) book) when she was about 11 or 12 years of age. It was a story traditionally told to young girls by their grandmothers or aunts; it has parallels in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet! Mooyumbin Creek, which joins the Nerang River just upstream of Nerang town centre, takes its name from two of the characters in this Dreamtime story. Nerang itself, takes its name from an Aboriginal word NEERUNG, meaning shovelnose shark — these sharks used to come right up the river to where present day Nerang is located in search of mullet and other fish.

A Nerang River Love Story

A long time ago there was a young man, YIMBIN, and a young woman, MUYIM. They always went together and would soon to be married. But every time that they walked near the water of the lagoon, a bad spirit (BUNYIP), who lived there, became jealous of the young man and decided to take the girl for himself. So one day when the girl came to the waters edge alone, BUNYIP kidnapped her. With his magical powers, he turned her into a blue water lily and placed her in the middle of the lagoon.

Later, YIMBIN, searching for his girl tracked her to the edge of the lagoon. He could not understand what had happened to her but she was gone. He sat down and started to mourn for his lost love.

BUNYIP saw him sitting at the edge of the lagoon and took pity on him. BUNYIP thought "His girl is mine for ever, but I will place him close to her." With this he transformed the young man into a reed and planted him firmly in the mud at the margins of the lagoon. That way he could be close to his girl.

There YIMBIN remains to this day. When the wind blows across the lagoon, he reaches out to his loved one, MUYIM, in the centre of the lagoon.

This story was told by Ginny Graham to her grand-daughter, Hilma Dillon, when Hilma was 11 or 12 years of age. The story would have been told to aboriginal girls of similar age in the past.

Nerang was an especially important area for the Gombemberri people. It was the location of one of the largest Aboriginal camps in south east Queensland. There were two main reasons for choosing Nerang for this early settlement. One was its geographic location on the crossroads into the Hinterland and down to the coast. The other reason was the plentiful food resources accessible from Nerang, with freshwater fish in the river, many sea foods available on the coastal strip and in the Broad water and a variety of plant and animal foods found within the Hinterland forests up into the Numinbah Valley. Materials for making tools and domestic implements were also readily available. Not surprisingly, Nerang was an important centre for large gatherings or CORROBEREES, for feasts and dancing, with people from neighboring areas walking great distances to join the Gombemberri for these celebrations. Nerang really was a great place to live in those times.

Some historical events

·        1848 – Queensland Native Mounted Police force (QNMP) founded to take action against ‘hostile’ Aboriginal groups to protect land annexed by settlers and settler property; in practice this became an excuse for ‘legalised murder’ of Aboriginal people. One such incident (1860) near Nerang involved QNMP opening fire on a group of Gombemberri camped on the Nerang River banks, killing an old blind man. Countrywide treatment of the Aboriginal people was often brutal and cruel, with settlers regarding them as ‘savages’ (see William Lines, 1991, for details).

·        1861 – Accelerated invasion of Gombemberri land following American Civil War outbreak, with attempts (largely unsuccessful) to grow cotton on Nerang floodplain. The Manchester Cotton Company took over lands in this area from 1863 onwards and sugar cane production was tried from1865 onwards. Progressively, more and more land was taken from the Gombemberri people as more settlers moved into the region and farms were established. The 1876 parish maps of the Nerang district demonstrate that extensive areas of land had been ‘alienated’ for farming, pushing the surviving Gombemberri into the remnant marginal areas of the Hinterland. This cut them off from traditional coastal food supplies and restricted access routes along the main rivers into the forested hills, so crippling the very foundations of their hunter-gatherer economy. This also prevented further ceremonial social interactions between tribes.

·        1871 – Aboriginal Industrial Mission Reserve established by German Lutherans on the banks of the Nerang River near the site of present day Nerang High School. The priests taught the Gombemberri who came to the mission to grow horticultural crops. However, jealousy from settlers and timber-getters over the success of this venture resulted in local Aboriginal people being supplied with illicit rum which, in turn, resulted in numerous, sometimes fatal, spear fights that eventually saw the demise of the mission.