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The Gandangara people, also spelled Gundungara, Gandangarra, Gundungurra and other variations, are an Aboriginal Australian people in south-eastern New South Wales, Australia. Their traditional lands include present day Goulburn, Wollondilly Shire, The Blue Mountains and the Southern Highlands.
Their neighbours are the Darug people and the Eora to their north, Darkinung, Wiradjuri, Ngunnawal people and Tharawal people, (eastwards) peoples.
In 1811 Governor Macquarie started handing out numerous "land grants" to settlers in the Darawal area around Appin, one as large as given to William Broughton.
Aside from considerations of defending their territories against the European colonial expansion, a period of severe drought may have influenced this turn in strategy. Gandangara raiding bands, harvesting crops on settlers' properties, also attacked the Thurrawal and Dharug, so that the latter two began to collaborate against them, by helping the British authorities, and seeking refuge in squatters' settlements. Like other tribes, the Gandangara had developed strategies to cope with the superior firepower of musketry, teasing troops to fire at them, in the knowledge that, once fired, some time was required to reload them, during which the aborigines could launch spearing attacks.
Hearing a child's cry and a barking dog in the bush, Wallis lined up his soldiers to search for the fugitives. In the moonlight they could see figures jumping across the rocky landscape. Some of the Aborigines were shot and others were driven off the cliffs into a steep gorge. At least fourteen were killed and the only survivors were two women and three children. Among those killed was a mountain chief Cannabaygal, an old man called Balyin, a Dharawal man called Dunell, along with several women and children.
Aboriginal descendants claim the figure of 14 is an underestimate, and that many more were slaughtered. The bodies of Conibigal and Dunell, after being decapitated, were hung from trees near Broughton's property, as a warning to foraging natives. Their skulls, together with that of another beheaded woman, were exchanged for 30 shillings and a gallon of rum each in Sydney, according to the recollections of William Byrne in 1903, and were sent to England where they were lodged for study at Edinburgh University, and were only returned in 1991 and 2000. Negotiations have been underway for over a decade to have the remains, in Canberra, buried. The area believed to be the site where the Appin Massacre took place was returned to the local Aboriginal community by an act of Parliament.
Sixteen Gandangara people were captured as prisoners after the Appin massacre and four of their children were removed to the Native Institution at Parramatta. A young man named Dual was sentenced to seven years transportation to Van Diemen's Land for "his repeated crimes and offences" during the war. (2025). 9781921719073, Rosenberg. ISBN 9781921719073
Conflict with the colonisers flared in 1826 around Lake Bathurst, where local Gandangara people killed a stockman after they returned from a cultural ceremony at Moss Vale. A subsequent punitive expedition organised by armed settlers was unsuccessful and Governor Ralph Darling sent Captain Peter Bishop with a contingent of soldiers of the 40th Regiment to capture or terrify the resident tribes into submission. One Gandangara man was caught and sent to Sydney but was later released. It was claimed that no blood was shed during this military operation.
In 1828, there was some interaction between the Surveyor-General, Thomas Mitchell, and the Gandangara, near Mittagong. Mitchell was supervising road construction. The Gandarangara are said to have composed a cheeky song about the building of the road (perhaps with appropriate mimicry): Road goes creaking long shoes, Road goes uncle and brother white man see. It must have seemed that building a road just to visit kin was unnecessary effort. Men from the Gandarangara also acted as guides for Mitchell at the time.
Notwithstanding the attempts to disperse, intimidate, round them up, or kill them, the Gandangara population took refuge in the tough hinterlands like the Burragorong or at the estates of friendly colonists, and sustained themselves to the point where in the 1860s some claimed partial restitution of their lands.
The Gandangara of St Joseph's were interviewed in the early 1900s by the ethnographer R. H. Mathews, who took down some of their legendary lore. William Russell, a respected Gandangara elder, was a Burragorang resident and wrote an important autobiography just before his death in 1914 at the age of 84. St Joseph's produced several locally famous athletes including sprinter Stephen Sherrit and cricketer Joe Clarkson.
Some Gandangara families avoided being placed at the mission, with John Riley and John Jingery being allowed to take up small leaseholds along the Wollondilly River, while Billy Lynch's family were allowed a conditional purchase of land in the Megalong Valley. Lynch was important in the establishment of a Gandangara encampment in 1897 at "The Gully" (Garguree) near Katoomba, which became home to a significant number of Gandangara and Dharug families for several decades.
To the south in the Goulburn area, displaced Gandangara formed a fringe dwellers settlement or "blacks' camp", but they were moved on in 1898 to make way for the Goulburn golf course.
When the St Joseph's mission at Burragorang was closed in the 1920s, most of the remaining residents were forced to move to the Aboriginal Reserve at La Perouse in coastal Sydney. Here, displaced Gandangara people became involved in Aboriginal rights, with W.G. Sherrit becoming an activist in the 1938 Day of Mourning. (2025). 9781742235110, NewSouth. ISBN 9781742235110
Gurangatch, not wholly a serpent, but part fish, and part reptile, camped in the shallows of an area known as Murraural, specifically at the junction of the Wollondilly and Wingeecaribbee rivers. It was here, while he basked in the sun, that the redoubtable fish-hunter, Mirragañ the quoll, glimpsed the light reflected from Gurangatch's eyes and endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to spear him. The quoll tried to force his prey back from the depths of the waterhole, where Gurangatch had sought refuge, by planting ever more bundles of nauseating slabs of millewa Hickory here and there in the various soaks and pools. Gurangatch, wise to the plan, burrowed his way out, tunneling through the landscape, drawing the lagoon waters in his train, till he emerged on a high rocky ridge called thereafter Birrimbunnungalai, since it is rich in birrimbunnung (sprats)
The features of the landscape were etched as Gurangatch wriggled and slipped across and under the terrain, in flight from his predator, or sometimes while directly fighting with him. When Mirragañ caught up with his prey, he would flail away at him with a club ( boodee), while Gurangatch would strike by thrashing his tormentor with a whipping from his tail. The site now called Slippery Rock, native name Wonggaree, marks a point where they engaged in struggle for a long time, wearing the rock down so smoothly that people slip on it ever since. In a 2021 FlyLife article, Karl Brandt proposed the Australian lungfish as the inspiration for Gurangatch.
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