Within a shelter near Mellong Creek is an Aboriginal drawing in red ochre of what has been described as a horse; the large figure does not resemble any native animal.
The head of the “horse” is not very horse-like; but neither does it look like any native macropod.
The deep shelter does not contain any other motifs.
Horses were likely first brought through the Mellong and Colo Heights area in November 1817 by government explorer and former convict William Parr, who used packhorses during his expedition to find a route from the Hawkesbury to the Hunter Valley. A couple of years later in 1819, Chief Constable John Howe led a party of five white men and two Aboriginal guides from Windsor in search of an overland stock route north across rugged ranges (including the Mellong/Putty region) to the Hunter River.
After the delays, it was the middle of Monday 1 November 1819 before Howe’s party reached the local camp of about sixty people, where some had not yet seen a white man or a horse. The Aborigines from Richmond had held off Howe, perhaps waiting for an arrangement with a man there who became Howe’s guide. These tactics by the Aborigines would certainly have allowed Ben Singleton to have reached the river first, and the ‘guide’ may have been absent with Singleton when Howe arrived at Putty. In moving the short distance from Putty to the camp, bushwalker historian Andy Macqueen has identified they had crossed what is now called Mellong Range from the Colo catchment to the Macdonald River catchment.
An Analysis of the Historiography for the Aborigines from the Hawkesbury-Hunter Ranges to the Northwest of Sydney
This opened up the area in the 1820s and 1830s to pastoralists and stockmen who progressively brought horses and cattle into the remote valleys for grazing and transport – and is consistent with the majority of contact art around the outer fringes of Sydney being dated to the early 1830s.
More information
- Geoffrey Eric (‘Geoff’) Ford – Darkiñung Recognition: An Analysis of the Historiography for the Aborigines from the Hawkesbury-Hunter Ranges to the Northwest of Sydney [PDF]
0 Comments