Cabrogal

Everyone is always asking me about my online name. By ‘everyone’ I mean four people and by ‘always’ I mean four times in the last eight years. But hey, you’re all curious about it, right?

The first thing to say is that the ‘-gal’ suffix does not mean I’m a woman nor that I aspire to be one. Somewhat the contrary in fact.

‘Cabrogal’ is the name of the band of Australian Aborigines from which I descend. My great-great grandmother, married name Lucy Leane, was the last of the Cabrogal people living on traditional land in what’s now the Liverpool and Georges River region of western Sydney.

This is the Cabrogal band around fifty years after first contact. The dude third from the right in the back row looks a bit like I did when I was a teenager. Depending on what’s in his pipe he may have been a lot like I was as a teenager.

‘Cabrogal’ is a Dharug word derived from ‘cabro’ or ‘cohbra’ – an aquatic woodworm considered a delicacy that abounded in the rivers of their land  – and ‘gal’, a suffix meaning ‘men’. The suffix for women is ‘galyon’. Yeah, I know it’s a bit sexist, but we don’t call the people from Germany ‘Gerpersons’ do we?

As a Sydney basin tribe their initial contact with the European invaders was devastating, first when they were ravaged by the smallpox epidemic that came in the wake of white settlement then when many of the surviving warriors joined Pemulwuy’s resistance and paid with their lives. By the 1830s the remaining Cabrogal had been largely assimilated culturally and their traditional way of life was gone forever. It was only in the 1920s with the advent of racist policies such as those that led to the Stolen Generations that they were ‘unassimilated’ again, causing my family members to scatter and adopt non-Aboriginal fake identities, pretending to be Southern Europeans, Maoris, Native Americans – anything except indigenous Australians.

William and Lucy Leane, circa 1870.

But in 1865, before all that had happened, Lucy had married the wealthy and influential white landowner (or land-stealer) William Leane, raising thirteen children and thereby continuing the ancient bloodline that now flows in my veins. Apparently she and William met when he saw her foraging in the water of the Liverpool river. Thinking she was drowning (or pretending to) he dived from his boat and ‘rescued’ her. He must have liked what he had a hold of because they were to stay together until her death over thirty years later. Her life as a mother, trader and proud Aborigine was documented in several official records and forms the basis of a chapter in the history textbook, Rivers and Resilience by Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow.

Despite recent attempts to revive the Dharug language I think it fair to say the traditional language, lifestyles and beliefs of the Cabrogal people are almost entirely and irretrievably lost. Our people are dispersed – most not even knowing of their black heritage – and our Land is under the carparks and shopping malls of Sydney. Even if it is still possible to find cohbra in Sydney’s waterways there is probably no-one living there who would dream of eating it and given the level of pollution it would probably not be safe to do so.

But I am proud to be able to call myself Cabrogal and to have roots in this land that stretch back tens of thousands of years. And I’m proud to be a descendant of a woman like Lucy Leane, no matter what colour she may have been.