Quandamooka
| Quandamooka people | |
|---|---|
| Location: | Moreton Bay, Southeast Queensland |
| Coordinates: | 27°30′S 143°30′E / 27.500°S 143.500°ECoordinates: 27°30′S 143°30′E / 27.500°S 143.500°E |
| Notable people | |
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Leeanne Enoch |
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The Quandamooka people are an Aboriginal Australian group that live around Moreton Bay in Southeastern Queensland. They are composed of three distinct tribes, the Nunukul, the Goenpul and the Ngugi, and they live primarily on Moreton and North Stradbroke Islands, that form the eastern side of the bay. Many of them were pushed out of their lands when the English colonial government established a penal colony near there in 1824. Each tribe has its own language. A number of local food sources are utilised by the tribes.
The term Quandamooka refers geographically to the southern Moreton Bay, the waters, islands and adjacent coastal areas of the mainland. The Nunukul and Goenpul tribes lived on Stradbroke Island, while the Ngugi tribe lived on Moreton Island. The Nunukul, Goenpul and Ngugi tribes together constitute the Quandamooka people.
The archaeological remains of the Moreton Bay islands were studied intensively by V.V. Ponosov in the mid 1960s, and indigenous occupation of the islands seems to go back at least some 18,000 years BP.
The Quandamooka people first encountered Europeans in 1799, when the English navigator and cartographer Matthew Flinders passsed several weeks exploring Moreton Bay. The Moreton Bay people occasionally took in and cared for English ticket-of-leave castaways, most notably Thomas Pamphlet, Richard Parsons and John Finnegan, whom the explorer John Oxley found when he sailed into the bay in 1823. The first settlement, a penal colony, was established the following year by Oxley at Redcliffe with 50 settlers, 20-30 of whom were convicts. Contacts were scarce for over a decade, as no free settlers were allowed to enter within a 50 mile radius of the penal colony. As free settlers began to move in, the indigenous peoples were pushed out of the more fertile lands into the coastal fringe, with many of them moving to the less occupied small islands. The three Quandamooka peoples each faced dispossession and the loss of their hunting and fishing grounds. The presence of settlers introduced a number of diseases that ravaged the islands and coastal areas. Forced displacements and the removal of children also had an impact. The indigenous people living on Stradbroke island were able to sustain their lifestyle for the longest period; however, in 1897 the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the sale of Opium Act moved all indigenous people to reservations, with the exception of those who were imprisoned or were employed as servants.
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