Indigenous Australia

Charlotte Bugg (c. 1813–1861), Birrpai matriarch, was born on Birrpai (Birrbay) Country in the early 1810s in the surrounds of what is now Gloucester, New South Wales. Neither her parents’ names nor her Birrpai personal and clan names, by which she would have been known to her kin, were recorded.

The first white trespassers on Birrpai lands were John Oxley’s party of explorers who arrived in 1818 while Charlotte was an infant. In 1824 the British parliament granted a million acres of Worimi (Warrimay) and Birrpai lands, from Port Stephens to the Manning River, to the Australian Agricultural Co. (AACo). This led to the first white occupation of Worimi and then Birrpai lands, commencing with the arrival of Robert Dawson at Port Stephens in January 1826. During this time Charlotte lived with her clan; it is likely she went through some stages of Women’s Law and was married to a Goori (First Nations) man.

James Bugg, a convict from Little Horkesley, Essex, was assigned to the AACo in 1827 as a shepherd. By 1829 he had been promoted to overseer and was in charge of five other convicts. He established a sheep run south-west of Gloucester that became known as Bugg’s station. Located on the northern edge of the European frontier, it signalled the beginning of the AACo’s expansion into the traditional lands of Charlotte and her clan. Charlotte had probably met Bugg by 1830; they would have their first child, Maryann/Mary Ann, in 1834, and their second child, John, in 1836.

It was not unheard of for Aboriginal women to have arranged marriages with white men, partly as a way of facilitating peaceful coexistence by incorporating white men into local kinship relationships, though few white men understood the nature of the obligations thus incurred. In 1835 Bugg, now the holder of a ticket-of-leave, was bashed unconscious by two Birrpai men. Earlier Bugg and fellow convicts had been drinking tea and yarning with a larger group of Birrpai men for several hours. Why the two men attacked Bugg is unknown, but it may have been payback for not fulfilling the kinship obligations linked to his marriage to Charlotte. A record of the incident states that Charlotte, identified only as ‘a Black woman’ (Colonist 1838, 4), emerged from the hut they shared and fired a musket over the heads of her kinsmen, who ceased the attack. A few days later Birrpai men killed four convicts at nearby McKenzie’s station. Bugg’s station became the base from which a military unit and police constables pursued the tribesmen.

In 1837 the newly appointed governor of New South Wales, Sir George Gipps, identified cohabitation between convicts and Aboriginal women as the cause of increased hostilities in the colony; he would not arrive in Sydney until the following year. He understood that Aboriginal women were often forced into such relationships, provoking violence in retribution, and his attention was drawn to the Port Stephens Estate of the AACo where such practices were believed to be common. Gipps threatened to withdraw convict labour from any district where cohabitation was occurring. With a history of labour shortages, the AACo took his threat seriously. Fearing ‘instantaneous ruin’ (NBAC AU 78), company officials sought to remove the most obvious signs of cohabitation, namely Maryann and John Bugg. Rev. William Cowper of the Anglican Church at Stroud sought to place the children at the Wellington Valley mission or the soon-to-be-established Aboriginal protectorate at Port Phillip. Instead, and after much deliberation, in 1839 they were sent to orphan schools at Parramatta and Cabramatta. Gipps, who approved this arrangement, anticipated their eventual relocation to Port Phillip, but there is no evidence that this occurred.

Immediately before Maryann and John’s removal, and to facilitate their placements, Bugg had them baptised in the Anglican Church. He also sought permission to marry Charlotte, possibly in an effort to retain the children, as, in the British common law, coverture provided a degree of protection to wives and children; however, such permission was denied. Nevertheless, he travelled with Maryann and John to Sydney, and his payment of a sum equivalent to more than one and a half times his annual salary towards their upkeep, as well as his pledge to continue providing for them, suggests that he not only cared for them but also intended to reclaim them when the opportunity became available.

It was not enough just to remove the children; Charlotte, too, had to be seen to disappear. Her presence on Bugg’s station as a source of labour was no doubt tolerated, as other Birrpai were employed there as shepherds, but she would have had to spend more time in the ‘blacks camp’ rather than in Bugg’s hut. Yet, their relationship continued, and their third child, Eliza, was born in 1838. That she was not removed along with Maryann and John is testament to the efforts of Charlotte and Bugg to conceal her from company officials.

With the cessation of transportation to New South Wales in 1840, the power of Gipps’s threat evaporated, leaving Charlotte and Bugg, who obtained a conditional pardon in 1842, free to live together. They would have another five children—William (b. 1841), James (b. 1843), Jane (b. 1845), Elizabeth (b. 1847), and Thomas (b. 1850)—and be married in September 1848 by a visiting Presbyterian minister from Port Macquarie. Following Bugg’s sacking by the AACo in 1855, the family moved south to Monkerai on Worimi Country, establishing a farm on 2,320 acres (939 ha) sublet from the AACo.

Charlotte’s final years were spent at Monkerai, her time occupied with farming and mothering duties. Survived by her husband, she died from a liver complaint on 26 April 1861 at Monkerai and was buried there. Throughout her life she displayed qualities of stoicism, humanity, adaptability, and love. These enabled her to survive not only the racism she faced as a black woman married to a white man, but also the ongoing frontier violence and dispossession of Goori lands, laws, and practices. Her descendants include Mini Heath, New South Wales Aboriginal Artist of the Year in 1983 and one of five Aboriginal designers to exhibit in Paris in 1986; Anthony ‘Choc’ Mundine, a professional rugby league footballer and boxer who won world boxing titles in 2003 and 2009; Stacey Porter, the first Indigenous person to represent Australia in softball at an Olympic Games (2004, 2008); and Karen Kime, the first Indigenous female archdeacon in the Anglican Church in Australia (2012).

John Heath is a Birrpai Traditional Owner living on Country at Bonny Hills, New South Wales. A third-great-grandson of Charlotte Bugg, he is directly descended from Maryann Bugg’s second oldest brother William.