This unwitting destruction by the whites was but one of the misunderstandings between white and black which helped make the relationship between the two so unhappy. It was Destiny, of course.

The Chief Look-out Posts of the Gunn-e-darr Tribe

Sir Thomas Mitchell in his explorations to the north-west mentions Ydire or Nobby Rock. He was exploring the Namoi in search of the Kindur, a great and wonderful river according to the reports of George Clarke, the escaped convict called “The Barber”, first white man to live on the Namoi with the blacks. In December 1831 Mitchell eventually pitched his camp near Nobby Rock. Almost twenty-five miles away he could see the sharp outline of Tangulda, Barber’s Pinnacles. Mitchell, with Surveyor White, climbed Nobby Rock, where White took bearings of the principal summits, securing the aboriginal names from the natives. Mitchell was well pleased with the grandeur of the scene, and has left an interesting account of what the country looked like then as seen from these mountain look-outs.

Place Names

I have used some place names of the present day so that the reader can see at a glance the localities where the events of the story took place. The country was very different then, of course.

The Name of Gunnedah

There is some doubt as to the origin of the name of the present town of Gunnedah. Several of the old hands have left on record that the name came from Cumbo Gunnerah, which they believed was one of the aboriginal names of the Red Chief.

Others say—and Ridley has it in his vocabulary of the Kamilaroi—that it is the same word as Gunida, meaning “place of the white stones”.

There are no “white stones” in Gunnedah now. But until the eighties there was in Elgin Street, on the site of the present Intermediate High School, a small hill of white stones, probably crushed quartz or limestone. The stone was very friable and quickly crumbled, making it ideal for the making of roads. The hill was carted away and used in the formation of the streets.

A Story of Bungaree

Old Bungaree, “King” of the Gunnedah blacks, was a well-known figure in the district in the nineties. He died at Pullaming Station, a very old man. A well-known yarn of old Bungaree was that one dark, cold night, having imbibed not wisely but exceeding well, he swam the Mooki River, crawled shivering up to a boundary rider’s hut, and noiselessly got into bed between the sound asleep boundary rider and his wife. When the couple awoke in the morning to the grampus-like snores of their uninvited bedmate their feelings may be imagined.

The Date of the Story

So far as could be ascertained, the Red Chief lived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Bungaree told of a great flood that apparently occurred about 1750, changing the course of the Namoi and Mooki rivers. The Red Chief appears to have died about twenty years before this flood.

J. P. Ewing and S. C. Ewing