Gunnedah's Two Unlikely Heroes

​Gunnedah sits at the junction of the Namoi and Mooki Rivers on the North West Slopes of NSW. It boasts two heroes of a very different kind. One is Cumbo Gunnerah, 'The Red Kangaroo' as he was called by his people, a great warrior and revered leader of the Gunn-e-dar people of the Kamilaroi tribe. He was born, lived and died a child of the wilderness, long before the white men came.
 
The other is Dorothea McKellar, daughter of native-born parents, who grew up protected and highly cultured, moving easily between three worlds - the society of Sydney's elite, her brothers' farms near Gunnedah and among family friends in London. She is best known for her bush poetry.
 
They couldn’t be more contrasting figures and yet they shared much in common. The Bush spoke to them both. The fabled war chief hunted far and wide across his native territory between the New England Ranges and the Warrumbungle Mountains – he read it like a book.
 
The accomplished city girl learned the beauties and terrors of her wide brown land as she rode the same mountains and Breeza Plains on horseback. Both were intelligent and proficient in several languages. In their own ways, both understood the spirit of the land.

Author Ion Idriess was haunted for a long time by the knowledge of Red Kangaroo’s story. What had gripped him was being gifted a narrative from the lips of old Bungaree, the last full-blood aboriginal of the Gunn-e-dar people. The King of the Namoi Valley tribe gave his CV very simply, “In every tribe there are men trained to remember. And so, my father trained me.”
 
 Indigenous peoples have relayed prodigious amounts of information accurately for millennia by this kind of careful oral transmission. Bungaree’s long, continuous oral history had been copied down word by word by Stan Ewing in the late 1800’s, when Dorothea was just a girl.  As an authentic bushman and widely travelled storyteller, Idriess instinctively knew this was a whisper from Australia’s  fast receding past that needed writing.
 
Reluctant at first, he eventually wove it into The Red Chief, a successful book which immortalised the great leader. Combined with the first-hand knowledge Idriess had gained when living with Aboriginal people and the painstaking work of Rev John Ridley who translated languages of the tribes along the Namoi and Barwon Rivers in the 1870’s, his imaginative reconstruction is a masterful example of the art of storytelling.
 
The heartbeat of the drama is Red Kangaroo’s passionate love for his people and his country. As a young warrior he watches poor leadership shrink the size and defensive capacities of his tribe. He rises up to challenge the unlawful and the unfair and when he eventually becomes chief, through shrewd leadership, he brings justice, security and prosperity to his Gunn-e-dah tribe. More than two centuries later he was memorialised in bronze - believed to be the first monument to honour an Aboriginal historical identity.
 
Dorothea Mackellar, raised in a wealthy professional family in urban Sydney, was a homesick 19-year-old girl visiting England when she published her wistful poem ‘Core of My Heart’ in 1904. It was her passionate response to negative expatriates who spoke loudly of their preference for England’s ordered woods and gardens.
 
Her words struck a chord with a generation of Australians from European backgrounds who were searching for a way to express their love for the brighter, wilder, more rugged landscapes of their native country. That’s why Dorothea too is celebrated in bronze in Gunnedah and her poem has become the most enduring home-coming hymn for the land-down-under – ‘My Country.’
 
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror,
The wide brown land for me!
 
As Cumbo Gunnerah and his tribe walked their country they would have sung their song line, merging their daily activities seamlessly with the unseen world of the spirit. In Idriess’s retelling of Red Kangaroo’s biography, he has old Mullionkale the storyteller gathering the youngsters around him at night to tell them the creation stories of their people. “As you all know, Baia-me is the Great Builder, He Who Made All Things - the stars and the lizards, the fishes, the trees and the wee insects. He even made you and me!” He assured them that Baia-me had left his agent Turramulan to watch over them.
 
Dorothea never professed to be a poet, but said she simply tried to express what her heart, her imagination and her experience had given her. She requested her favourite poem 'Colour' be read at her memorial service at St Mark’s Anglican church in Sydney in 1968. It was her 'song line' that told of an awareness of the Creator speaking constantly through the symphony of colours that had steeped her soul unknowingly every day – Australia’s saffron sunset clouds, its nights of blue and pearl and its purple seas.
 
Thanks be to God, Who gave this gift of colour,
Which who shall seek shall find;
Thanks be to God, Who gives me strength to hold it,
Though I were stricken blind.
 
It’s certain Gunnedah’s two unlikely heroes saw their country as the core of their heart.
I think they would have understood the  song line the ancient Hebrew people sang as they walked the hills and valleys of Palestine. It is said to be one of the poems composed by their   legendary  warrior king, David.
 
Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name  in all the earth!
You have set your glory
    in the heavens.
 When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?
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