Nah Doongh at Penrith, 1890s (Local Studies Collection, Penrith City Library)

This second photograph was probably taken by Sarah Shand, playwright and painter, and wife of the local doctor, John Cappie Shand. The Shand family arrived from the north of England in 1886, and Nah Doongh befriended Shand soon after. She appeared on the Shands’ verandah one day, leaning on the doorpost, and when asked what she wanted, replied cheerily, ‘Oh, nothing, just came to see you, yer know.’ Shand was keen to meet a ‘real Aborigine’ and Nah Doongh was charming and eccentric. She wore two dresses and as many as seven petticoats at once, which made her look bigger than she was.

Over the following months, Nah Doongh patiently answered all of Shand’s curious questions, told her stories, and tried to teach her Aboriginal words. Shand in turn sketched ‘Black Nellie’ and even painted her portrait in oils. The painting has haunted me for years. What became of it? Could it still exist somewhere?

The main reason we know about Nah Doongh is that The Nepean Times published Shand’s reminiscences about her in 1914. It was a nostalgic piece sparked by Penrith’s enthusiastic celebrations of its pioneer and foundational history: the centenary of the construction of Cox’s Road. These history-making events were also ‘high seasons of memory’, in Tom Griffiths’s evocative words. Shand’s piece is charmingly written and reveals her as an acute observer. But it seems her narrative was heavily edited for publication, for Penrith Library’s Local History Collection holds another, darker version of Shand’s stories about Nah Doongh.

At first, Nah Doongh would always return to her hut on the Common after visiting the Shands. But in flood times she began to stay over with them, remaining for up to six weeks. When the great flood of 1891 roared through the Nepean valley, she decided to move in with the Shands permanently. Shand recalled being slightly discombobulated when a cheery Nah Doongh arrived at the family’s residence and surgery in High Street, Penrith, with all her possessions piled in a cart. The move was clearly Nah Doongh’s idea. Shand wrote that ‘Black Nellie’ became devoted to the family, and Shand descendants say that they loved her too – in the way that families loved their servants. In Shand’s narrative, Nah Doongh’s story ends happily. In old age, she was sheltered and safe, among people who loved her.

Nah Doongh became a familiar figure in local histories of Penrith and the Nepean, her poignant photographs reproduced alongside snatches of her voice. Yet they remain strangely unexamined, a filtered voice from the century before last, played over and over again. What if we place Nah Doongh at the centre of her own story? What if we begin by listening closely to what she was trying to tell Shand?

Here we collide spectacularly with the methodological and ethical dilemmas at the heart of so much Aboriginal history: the fact that the richest records were usually created by the colonists. They come to us indelibly shaped by settler-colonial ideas about race and gender. Shand’s narratives are a textbook case of the racist tropes about Aboriginal women exhaustively identified and catalogued in Liz Conor’s fierce book Skin Deep: Settler impressions of Aboriginal women (2016). Old Aboriginal women especially were portrayed as repulsive, primitive, victims of violence, figures of fun. So many of Shand’s stories turn on images of decrepitude, foolish superstition, childishness.

And yet, and yet, the stories remain. Shand wrote evocatively about Nah Doongh’s witty and mischievous good humour, her kindness and gentleness, and her strong, dignified, and at times outspoken character. Still more importantly, she wrote down what she could recall of Nah Doongh’s knowledge and beliefs. Indigenous historians like John Maynard and Martin N. Nakata argue that it is possible for Aboriginal people to reclaim these sorts of records, despite their limitations and corruptions. Nah Doongh’s voice is there, embedded in Shand’s white colonial narrative, at times ‘talking up to the white woman’. Asked how old she was ‘when the white people came’, she responded sardonically with a common settler myth about Aboriginal people: ‘Waal, misses, I carn tell ye ’cos blacks carn count no more than five.’ Shand seems to have taken this literally.

But the most striking example of Nah Doongh’s voice is her song. Shand recalled that once a month Nah Doongh would dress in her best clothes and go out. Occasionally, she returned ‘drunk and dirty’ – and that was when she sang. Shand listened as ‘first she mumbled a sort of aboriginal incantation, then the chorus was this’:

All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – One finger.
All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – Two finger. 
All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – Three finger. 
All the land belong to Mr McCarthy – Four finger. 

As she repeated each line of this chorus, Nah Doongh counted off four fingers, and ‘then began the aboriginal incantation again, etc.’ Shand said, ‘I don’t know what it meant.’ She did not write down the Aboriginal words of the song.

What are we to make of Nah Doongh’s song: freed from throat and tongue by alcohol, sung in both Aboriginal and English ninety years after the invasion of her Country? All the land belong to Mr McCarthy, rhythmically repeated four times, counted out on fingers. It is clearly about a settler family. It sounds like a song about dispossession.

Archaeologist James L. Kohen thought Nah Doongh was singing about the well-known local McCarthy family at Castlereagh, descendants of the first James McCarthy, an Irish Catholic emancipist. By the 1870s and 1880s the McCarthys were considerable landowners, and pillars of the local Catholic community.

A good, logical guess. But it’s probably wrong. The unspoken assumption here is that Nah Doongh must have been singing about local Penrith settlers, because she never left her Country. But Aboriginal people had rights to multiple areas through their parents and grandparents; with proper permissions and protocols, they customarily travelled on regular ‘beats’ for social and ceremonial business, fights and contests, seasonal harvesting, and caring for Country. And, of course, for marriages.

These are the journeys – cyclical and purposeful – that archaeologists and historians such as Denis Byrne, Maria Nugent, and Paul Irish have mapped using the techniques of ‘life mapping’ or ‘geobiography’. Reconstructing these journeys from fragments of evidence can recover patterns of the vast social, cultural, and spiritual networks cast across Country, and can reveal the way they continued and evolved after invasion and colonisation.

At the same time, I want to acknowledge the limits of biography and geobiography, of what we can know about people so utterly erased from mainstream history. At every turn, evidence is profoundly mediated by happenstance, by vast silences, by loss. Human figures are indistinct, like shapes deep underwater; tiny clues flicker, their significance magnified by the unknown. So this story of Nah Doongh is bookended with what I call ‘ghost biography’. Her early womanhood, and where and when she died, are both tenuous, spun from single names, strung on gossamer threads.

In his book Daruganora: Darug Country – the place and the people (2006), James L. Kohen claims that Nah Doongh moved south-east to the Georges River as a young woman and became the wife of Coomun, a leader of the Liverpool band. Coomun and Nelly Colonga are recorded as the parents of two daughters, Eleanor and Elizabeth, or Betsey, in the early 1820s.

This seems an improbable leap, involving a shift from the freshwater inland to the saltwater reaches of the Georges River, and from one language group to another. This woman’s name, Colonga, bears no obvious relation to Nah Doongh, and there could easily have been several Aboriginal women with the English name Nellie.

Yet Aboriginal women did marry outside their own clans, and often moved to their husbands’ Country. Nah Doongh was not the only Nepean woman to move to the Liverpool area: young Mulgoa woman Judith joined the group in 1822; and the newly married Maria Lock arrived in 1825.

There is one more bit of evidence, and it too hangs on a single name: Angelina. Nellie Colonga’s daughter Betsey remained in the Liverpool and South Coast communities, and Betsey’s granddaughter Angelina Timbery was born in Wollongong in 1873. Around the time Nah Doongh’s companion King Charlie died near Penrith in 1885, a girl called Angelina came to stay with her. Was this young girl Nah Doongh’s great-granddaughter, sent to be with her at a difficult time? Were there active family links, stretching over the century, and from the saltwater country to the Nepean?

La Perouse Aboriginal man Michael Ingrey doesn’t think so, pointing out that Angelina was a very popular name in the late nineteenth century. Even more telling, knowing where you come from and who your relations are is very important in Aboriginal communities. But Nah Doongh is not recognised as kin among the Aboriginal families of La Perouse today. She doesn’t belong to them.

Sometime in the 1830s, a group of Aboriginal people visited Camden Park, the estate of the wealthy and influential Macarthur family. Among the visitors was a young woman named ‘Black Nellie’, who met Johnny Budbury, a young Aboriginal constable and tracker. Johnny was born and raised in Camden. Local settler legend says that the two young people were instantly smitten with each other. When her band left, Johnny hid ‘Nellie’ in a barrel. ‘Black Nellie’ and Johnny Budbury then lived very happily together in a slab hut near the orchard at Camden. ‘Black Nellie’ was apparently good friends with the Macarthur women and other women in the district.

But by 1865, ‘Black Nellie’ had left Camden: her departure may relate to an incident over fruit. Sir William Macarthur was incensed to discover that Johnny was picking fruit from the orchard and taking it across the river to sell. In righteous rage he instantly ordered Johnny off the estate. It is possible that this high-handed outburst prompted ‘Black Nellie’ to leave Camden and return to her birth Country on the Nepean. Johnny Budbury followed her later, and he and Nah Doongh were living near Penrith in 1882.

Of course, there were multiple women called ‘Black Nellie’ . But there is clinching evidence that this woman was Nah Doongh. Penrith’s historian Lorraine Stacker located a photograph of ‘Black Nellie’ in the collection of the Camden Historical Society: an elderly Aboriginal woman wearing a white dress and a flowered hat, seated in front of a screen in the ‘Tile Room’ at Camden Park. Her left hand is withered, like Nah Doongh’s hand in the Penrith portrait. She even holds the same walking stick.

Nah Doongh made return journeys to Camden to visit her old friends. By the 1890s she was travelling on the railways to get there. I imagine her sitting in her many petticoats on the dark leather seats stamped ‘NSWGR’, watching Country slide by. She went back to Camden after Johnny Budbury died, to let the people of his Country know. This photograph may have been taken on one of her visits.

So we return to Nah Doongh’s song: All the land belong to Mr McCarthy. Given her long association with the wealthy, powerful Macarthurs, I think she was singing about them. By the 1890s, four generations of Macarthurs had owned Camden Park, and vast estates elsewhere as well. Four generations of Macarthurs, all the land belonging to them, the line repeated four times, once for each generation. The fragment of Nah Doongh’s song suggests it was probably about family and Country. She may have been singing settler history to white inheritors. The song carries that inescapable corollary: settler families were the vehicle for the dispossession of Aboriginal people. The more children they had, generation after generation, the more land they took.

The lives of poor and outcast people are so often invisible in written records. Yet life history is also written on the body – clothing, expressions, gestures and deportment, scars and injuries. Shand recalled her first meeting with Nah Doongh by describing her huge smile, her dark eyes twinkling in the shadow of a large hat, and the way she stood, ‘pressing her body on the doorpost, head slightly to one side’. But this fetching portrait was countered by Nah Doongh’s battered face and head. ‘She had several ugly scars across her left eye,’ Shand continued, ‘and one over the upper lip, which caused it to hang over, also a deep hole in her skull.’ Traces of Nah Doongh’s injuries are also visible in the photographs.

Strangely, neither Shand nor anyone else ever mentioned Nah Doongh’s most obvious debility: her withered left hand. What could have caused this deformity? How would it have affected Nah Doongh’s daily life? I asked Dr Stephen Oakley, a specialist in rheumatology who has a keen interest in historical cases. He and three medical colleagues reviewed the photographs of Nah Doongh: her hand, the angle at which her arm hangs by her side, the width of her wrists. To my astonishment they returned a diagnosis: Nah Doongh had Erb-Duchenne palsy.

The bundle of nerves anchored in the neck and connected to the arm is called the brachial plexus. At some stage in Nah Doongh’s life, these nerves were violently torn away. What we know of Nah Doongh’s injuries circle and seem to coalesce: the scars on the left side of her face, the depression in her skull, her left arm withered and palsied, together speak of a major, violent trauma. Dr Oakley thinks she must have suffered ‘a single massive blunt trauma either from a blow to the side of the head … a heavy fall to the ground or being forcefully rammed into a wall or door’.

People with Erb-Duchenne palsy suffer muscle weakness, they cannot use the affected arm, cannot flex their elbow or pull their wrist back. The outer side of the arm is numb right down to the thumb and index finger. Yet in the Penrith photograph, Nah Doongh wears an apron, the universal symbol of the domestic servant, a worker. Her arm and hand limp, she grasps her walking stick. Michael Ingrey, who is descended from the Shand family, says stories about Nah Doongh are still told in the family, for she looked after the four young Shand children.

 Nah Doongh, 1890s (Local Studies Collection, Penrith City Library)

Shand was intensely curious about Nah Doongh’s memory of her first contact with white people. Instead, Nah Doongh told her about Country: ‘all this place bush long ago, dis place Penrith, blacks call Mooror Moorack, plenty of wallaby, kangaroo, plenty of blacks, not many whites’. Her description of the early-contact years around Penrith rings true: Aboriginal people did far outnumber settlers.

The conversation then took a dramatic turn. ‘Poor Nellie,’ cooed Shand sympathetically, ‘People taken all your country.’ Nah Doongh, not quite believing what she was hearing, stole a furtive look at her friend, and she shot back an extraordinary question: ‘Wot youm come yourself den, you another white folk?’ Invasion and dispossession were not curious tales from the distant past: their impacts were still unrolling almost a century later. There is no doubt that Nah Doongh saw her own predicament in this light, and she asked the obvious question: If you know my Country was stolen, why are you here? You are white too.

Still Shand persisted with her questions about ‘when the whites came’. For Nah Doongh, Shand was a new friend, someone she hoped to cultivate. So she began the first-contact story again, this time invoking the Aboriginal version of Captain Cook as mythological invader-figure, or, in Deborah Bird Rose’s words, ‘the persona of conquest, the quintessential immoral European’. In Nah Doongh’s telling, Captain Cook was

a great big white man, bigger and [than] I ever saw, come down from Sydney way. Oh for black fellow frightened, tink a debil debil come. Dat man Captain Cook … come with guns and tings, shoot em too much kangaroo, not plenty for black man to eat, so all of them dies, except me.

This Captain Cook, terrifying though he was, didn’t shoot people, but game, in a greedy and immoral way. Ultimately, the outcome was the same: the deaths of Nah Doongh’s people.

In old age, Nah Doongh missed her own family. ‘All my folks are dead,’ she told the Shands sadly, ‘Mudder, Fadder, everybody dead, all but myself.’ They probably heard her words complacently, nodding at yet more evidence of the ‘dying race’. Yet for Nah Doongh it was surely not about ‘the race’ but her own family and band. She yearned for long-lost parents and younger brothers. If she had daughters and grandchildren on the coast, she didn’t speak of them. Her visits were to Camden, not La Perouse. Young Angelina never reappeared.

Ironically, it is because Nah Doongh was ‘the last’ and reliant on white people that we know so much about her. We know far less about the Aboriginal groups who managed to maintain families and communities. But what were they like, these white people Nah Doongh knew how to befriend?

In the decades before Federation, as the idea of a White Australia crystallised as a unifying identity and an aspiration for the coming nation, racialised language, imagery, and attitudes were deeply ingrained and taken for granted. In Miles Franklin’s 1909 novel Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, set on the Nepean near Penrith, the river folk casually use the term ‘black gin’ when they want to express ridiculousness or low status. Today the words are startling: they jump from the page. But not in Nah Doongh’s time. Then they were part of everyday conversation in the white community.

Shand’s oil portrait of Nah Doongh was an object of considerable local pride and interest. But on its first public display in 1893, The Nepean Times described Nah Doongh’s face with abhorrence: ‘The very hideousness of the grin, disclosing the great thick lips, the scanty fangs, the jagged gums, the puckered face, the dark subdued-treacherous eyes of the ancient aboriginal.’ None of this could have escaped Nah Doongh. But what choice did she have? ‘Mudder, Fadder, everybody dead, all but myself.’ She had no one else.

Despite Shand’s claim that faithful ‘Black Nellie’ stayed with them for years, this was not true; it was not the end of the story. By late 1895, Nah Doongh had left the Shand family. The Penrith police had sent an urgent request to the Aboriginal Protection Board: a cottage was needed for ‘Black Nellie’ as ‘no one can be found to take charge of this old woman’.

Nah Doongh told Shand where her home was: a farm on Bringelly Road called Frogmore, in present-day Kingswood. This was likely her birthplace. It’s the site of a school now, tidy asphalt, big gates, a carpark next door, and a tiny remnant of bushland at the back. A little more unravelling of Shand’s narrative reveals that Dr and Mrs Shand bought this farm in 1891, the same year Nah Doongh came to live with them. She may have been seeking more than shelter from the floods: she might have been trying to secure access to her home, her birthplace.

Nah Doongh also tried to explain her spiritual beliefs to her rather mystified friend. She said that ‘the devil caused the windy days – (“buoy, buoy” she called him)’ and that ‘good devil made the sun shine’. Devil was an early loan word from English used to describe both smallpox (devil-devil) and evil spirits. Boy was a coastal Sydney Eora word for death, or being dead, which by the 1840s was widely used as the name of an all-encompassing spiritual Being. Boy could be both benevolent and malevolent and was associated with strong winds. Shand’s narrative tends to relegate all of this to the realm of curious superstition, but Nah Doongh’s beliefs signal cultural continuity, an ongoing Aboriginal ontology of the world as inspirited.

We don’t know with any certainty where or when Nah Doongh died. Local collector and historian George Bunyan thought she was buried in St Stephen’s Cemetery at Penrith. But I searched St Stephen’s burial register and found no trace of her. There are no police or council records that might explain what happened to Nah Doongh. Stranger still is the absence of press reports. The deaths of old Aboriginal people were normally widely reported with maudlin fanfare: their passing was considered emblematic of the sad but inevitable extinction of the race, a core strand in the way settler Australians understood the forces of history. But there were no mournful odes for Nah Doongh. This silence suggests that Nah Doongh was not in Penrith when she died.

The New South Wales Registrar General holds a death certificate for an Aboriginal woman named Nellie. She died of diarrhoea and exhaustion on 10 December 1898 at the Newington Asylum for destitute women. Nellie was buried the same day at Rookwood Cemetery, no doubt in a pauper’s grave. A terse note on the certificate says: ‘This woman could not speak sufficient English to obtain any particulars for her. No friends.’ There are few surviving records for Newington Asylum, and none for this woman, Nellie, so we cannot know when she was admitted to the asylum or who brought her there. Nah Doongh, of course, spoke English well. But then I think of my own mother, who after a terrible fall could only speak her mother tongue.

Could this be Nah Doongh’s death certificate? If it is, her story ends in despair. Despite her long journey home and her strategically crafted friendships, she died away from her Country, unable to communicate, and among strangers. In the end, her song, stories, and teaching could not make Shand understand the injustices and losses colonisation had wrought upon her and her people. But what is biography for if not to awaken us to the shared predicament of hidden and forgotten people, the poor and old, the outcast people of Australia at the optimistic, exuberant brink of Federation? Whoever she was, wherever she came from, this Aboriginal woman died far from her Country, unable to communicate, and among strangers.

Biography is not a finite business; it’s a process, a journey. I have been researching, writing, and thinking about Nah Doongh, her song and stories, for over a decade now, but it was only when the link with Camden and the Macarthur family became clear that another detail in Shand’s narrative suddenly fell into place.

Shand wrote about Nah Doongh’s fine but faded beige shawl, which, she said, had been ‘sent out from England for the first MacArthur’s wife’. Clearly it was a gift from the Macarthur women, one which Nah Doongh treasured. Shand added that Nah Doongh was wearing this shawl when she painted her portrait. Oh, that lost painting again! What had become of it? Out of habit, only half-thinking, I googled those words one more time: Sarah Shand Black Nellie painting.

To my shock, there was a hit: ‘Sarah Shand, Nellie the Cook’. It led, ultimately, to an art dealer’s site: I held my breath. Finally the image appeared on my screen: a fine painting of a broadly smiling Nah Doongh, wearing a buttoned dress, similar to the one in the Penrith photograph, and a jaunty scarf. Her hair is brushed over the left side of her forehead. Her dark eyes twinkle. Mrs Macarthur’s fine, faded beige shawl is draped around her shoulders, just as Shand said. It falls into her lap, covering both her hands.

Nellie the Cook (c.1886), Sarah Shand

References

Aborigines Welfare Board Minute Book, 1895-1896, NSW State Archives and Records.

Alan Atkinson, Camden: Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales, Melbourne, 1988.

Denis Byrne, ‘Segregated landscapes: the heritage of racial segregation in New South Wales’, Historic Environment, 17, no 1, 2003.

Denic Byrne and Maria Nugent. Mapping Attachment, Sydney, 2004.

Liz Conor, Skin Deep: Settler impressions of Aboriginal women, Perth, 2016.

Barry Corr, Pondering the Abyss: A study of the language of settlement on the Hawkesbury Nepean Rivers, 2016, http://www.nangarra.com.au/

Miles Franklin, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, London, 1989 (fp 1909).

Heather Goodall and Alison Cadzow, Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River, Sydney, 2009.

Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Melbourne, 1996.

Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney, Sydney, 2017.

James L. Kohen, The Darug and their neighbours, Sydney, 1993.

James L. Kohen, Daruganora: Darug Country – The place and the people, Blacktown, 2006.

John Maynard, ‘Awabakal voices: the life and work of Percy Haslem’, Aboriginal History, 37, 2013, 77-92. 

J. Moloney, Early Menangle, Newcastle, 1929.

Robert Murray and Kate White, Dharug & Dungaree: The History of Penrith and St Marys to 1860, Melbourne, 1988.

Martin Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines, Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007.

Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human, Cambridge, 2000.

Sarah Shand, ‘Black Nellie’, Nepean Times 18 July 1914.

Sarah Shand ‘Some insights into the character of Queen Nellie’, c1914, transcript by George Bunyan, Local Studies Collection, Penrith City Library

Lorraine Stacker, Pictorial History Penrith & St Marys, Sydney, 2002.

Lorraine Stacker, Penrith: The Makings of a City, Sydney, 2007.

Jakelin Troy, The Sydney Language, Canberra, 1993.

Acknowledgments

I want to gratefully acknowledge and thank Alan Atkinson, Barry Corr, Tom Griffiths, Duncan Hulme, Michael Ingrey, Paul Irish, Terry Kass, Shino Konishi, Peter Lane, Stephen Oakley, Jasmine Seymour, Lorraine Stacker, Richard Waterhouse, Leanne Watson, Erin Wilson, Rhiannon Wright, and John Wrigley for their generous advice and help with this project.