1850s

Mahroot dies in the grounds of the St Joseph Banks Hotel at Botany.

Koori people, perhaps raising funds from locals and tourists, spear fish in Camp Cove with a ‘flaming torch and a four pronged spear’. The British visitor George Fife Angas calls this ‘a lively and a romantic effect’. He remarks that many rock carvings remain unobserved and that they are the remains of ‘a people who are now nearly extinct’.

The colonial visitor Angas often catches a steamboat from Circular Quay to the North Shore and writes, ‘One is soon transported to the secluded and picturesque scenery on the opposite shore, where the pathways leading through the bush are garnished with wild flowers, and the hills may be said to resemble, at this time of the year, one vast flower-garden.’

Queen Gooseberry is found dead at the Sydney Arms Hotel in Castlereagh Street, where according to press reports she had been drinking in the kitchen the previous night.

A popular Koori gathering place is Prince Alfred Park, Surry Hills, until it is destroyed by the construction of the railway line in 1855.

Koori people are noted as living in secluded areas, often wetlands, quite close to but separate from the city. These areas – for example, the Harold Park region - are at this time unwanted by the settlers for permanent living.

Anthony Martin Fernando is born at the Wooloomooloo town camp to an Aboriginal mother and possibly an Indian or Sri Lankan father named Silva. Throughout his life he fights against racism directed at Aboriginal and other British Empire Indigenous peoples. He later writes, ‘I was taken from my tribe before I was old enough to remember my mother, but the thought of my mother is the guiding stat of my life’. (Paisley, forthcoming)