WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

using European weapons against the colony. She taught her people '…to load and fire
off a musket, and to strike between discharging and re-firing' (G. A. Robinson quoted
from Australian Dictionary of Biography). Tarenorerer gathered a small group of men
and women from many bands to form a resistance group (Lowe 1994). Between 1828-
1830 they attacked settlements, killing sheep often with spears. Eumarrah, chief of the
Stony Creek people, is noted in the ADB as being a 'dynamic leader' who displayed
'mighty bushcraft' who led a number of raids against settlers in the Campbell Town
area between 1826-1828. Musquito, the Eora man from New South Wales was sent to
Tasmania as a government tracker but ended up joining a local Aboriginal group in
attacks on European settlers during the 1820s.
Dundalli, a Ningy Ningy man whose traditional land included the Bunya Mountains
in southeast Queensland conducted acts of retribution for tribal elders during the
1850s against an already dispersed European settlement. Rather than preventing the
frontier moving forward, Dundalli's actions were mainly in retribution for earlier
killings of Aboriginal people by Europeans. Using traditional weapons, he attacked
and killed some settlers and raided stocks and supplies, threatening the economy of
the colony rather than preventing its spread (Connors 2005).
Yagan, a Nyungar man raided properties in the Swan Valley colony using traditional
weapons, and Calyute, the other ADB-listed resistance fighter in the west, was
instrumental in the 'Battle of Pinjarra' , south of Perth in 1834 (Grassby and Hill
1996). In the Northern Territory, Nermaluk led a small band of men in the Port Keats
area spearing cattle, horses and attacking isolated travellers during the 1930s and
Dhakiyarr Wirrpanda, a Yolngu man, was arrested for the murder of a police
constable he speared whilst resisting arrest in 1933 (Carment et al. 1990).
Perhaps the most defining element of Jandamarra's success as a resistance fighter,
when compared to all of the above, was his intimate knowledge of European tactics
and weaponry, and his ability to pass on these skills to his countrymen and women.
As noted earlier, the circumstances of the late settlement of the northwest created a
different kind of frontier to the one that most of Australia's Aboriginal resistance
fighters had experienced in the previous 100 years. Ironically, the superior weaponry
of the late 1800s, that made the rolling frontier so deadly for Kimberley Aboriginal
people, also provided Jandamarra with the technology to meet his adversaries on an
equal footing. A similar claim could not be made for any of the other Aboriginal
resistance fighters listed in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
A rich historical, oral and contemporary record
The importance of Jandamarra's life and resistance nationally is exemplified by the
number of books written about him including: Ion Idriess's 1952 book 'Outlaw of the
Leopolds'; Colin Johnson's 1979 book 'Long Live Sandawarra'; and Howard
Pedersen's 1984 book 'Pigeon: An Australian Aboriginal Rebel'. Pedersen later
collaborated with Bunuba elder, the late Banjo Woorunmurra, to produce a definitive
history of Jandamarra in 1996, called 'Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance', which
gives prominence to oral tradition together with a re-reading of the archival record.
Jandamarra is one of 11 Aboriginal resistance fighters recognised in the Australian
Dictionary of Biography. His unusual life has also been recognised in the recent
documentaries 'First Australians: the untold story of Australia' (Perkins and Dale
2008) and 'Two in the Top End' (Doyle and Flannery 2008).
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