Boongaree’s sea hawk’s eggs

In the archives of the Western Australian Museum (WAM) is a donation register from 1871 which lists donations to the museum’s predecessor the Swan River Mechanics Institute, by John Septimus Roe. Roe was a midshipman on Phillip Parker King’s Australian hydrographic expedition (1817-22) and later became government surveyor in the Swan River Colony. The donations were largely made up of ethnographic and natural history collections made during King’s expeditions and from later inland journeys, but also reflects Roe’s connections with other traveller-collectors, as this list also includes collections made by others, such as Governor and Mrs Weld. On page 4 of the register, in Roe’s hand, the donation of ‘2 eggs of light brown Hawk’ is recorded, and the collector is named by Roe as ‘Boongaree’.   [Figure 1: WAM register] Boongaree was a Garigal man from Broken Bay who joined Phillip Parker King’s hydrographic expedition in 1818, working as an intermediary between the crew and Aboriginal people they met on shore. Boongaree – known today as the iconic go-between, Bungaree – also accompanied Matthew Flinders during his circumnavigation of Australia, and is remembered today as a man who could move with ease between the colonial and Aboriginal worlds of Port Jackson and beyond.

Roe’s position as midshipman on King’s expedition enabled him to make large personal collections for his family museum that he was establishing in the early 1800s, named 'Roevial'. His father, James Roe, a Reverend in the parish of Newbury, Berkshire, managed the museum back home with Roe’s brother William, while Roe, who travelled to Rio de Janiero, China, Australia and Peru, supplied the curiosities. It is probable that Roe obtained the sea hawk eggs that Boongaree collected either during King’s expedition, or at Port Jackson before returning to England in 1822. They may well have been displayed at Roevial before Roe moved to Swan River in 1829.

While these eggs have not been located in the current WAM collection, their entry into the museum by 1871 reveals an interesting history about the relationships between different collectors, the mobility of particular objects and the interests and experiences of intermediaries who were part of expeditions in this era.

If the eggs were collected by Boongaree during the course of King’s expedition, there are two locations where this may have occurred: at King George's Sound, or Dampier’s Archipelago.  The expedition visited King George's Sound three times, the first in January 1818. During this visit they came across a very large sea hawk’s nest, constructed of sticks and perched on ‘the summit of a steep perpendicular rock’ near the entrance of Oyster Harbour, which the crew were very taken by.  Matthew Flinders had also seen a nest of the same species in this location during his visit to King George’s Sound in 1803, and sea hawks still nest in this area today.  King sketched the nest in his Remark Book noting that it was Boongaree who identified the nest as belonging to a sea hawk.  [Figure 2: Sketch from King’s Remark Book] King recorded that the botanist Allan Cunningham, accompanied by the two midshipmen, Roe and Frederick Bedwell, couldn’t get close enough to ‘examine the nest clearly’. He did not mention if Boongaree examined the nest. Therefore, we cannot know if he collected the eggs here. Regardless, this visit reveals Boongaree’s interest in and knowledge of birds even though his assessment was not necessarily trusted by King who recorded that ‘Boongaree said [it] was a Sea Hawks nest’, adding ‘whether or not this is the case is doubtful though it carries with it some degree of plausibility – A bird of that species I have seen here as well as Pt Jackson being not so numerous. & Boongaree recognised the nest as similar to that of this bird’.  

The crew were clearly interested in the sea hawk and its nest. In a subsequent visit to King George's Sound in January 1822, King recorded that ‘The natives had promised to bring the crew the hawk’s nest that was built upon the rock near the watering place’, and in the vocabulary that was made from this visit, King recorded that a hawk was called ‘barlerot’.  

The other possible location from where the eggs were obtained is Dampier’s Archipelago where Boongaree was present. In February 1818, King recorded that: ‘On the summit of the bluff east end of the island was observed one of those immense nests that were seen at King George the Third’s Sound, the base of which measured seven feet in diameter’.   However, the crew were distracted by Yaburara people while they were examining it and it seems that nothing was collected here.  Another possibility is that Boongaree gave Roe two eggs from a sea hawk nest at Port Jackson when the expedition returned there between voyages.

While many questions remain about these eggs, their once existence reveals that intermediaries could sometimes be collectors too, using their ornithological knowledge to identify species during exploration and occasionally collecting specimens themselves.  The donation list was written at the time of Roe’s retirement, a time of reflection on a long career. His inclusion of Boongaree’s name as the collector on the WAM donation list reveal his respect for Boongaree’s interest in the activity of collecting, highlighting that respect for and dismissal of, intermediaries’ knowledge, was uneven on board the ship. It also linked Roe intimately to Boongaree, emphasising his relationship with a man who had become a famous go-between and colonial personality at the conclusion of King’s expedition.

If the eggs no longer exist, the traces of their history in the WAM archive is a reminder of the ways in which collected objects, such as Boongaree’s sea hawk eggs, frequently changed hands from field collector to gentleman collector to state institution, and that collecting institutions sometimes erased the histories of intermediaries, despite explorers’ occasional efforts at acknowledging them.