Brewarrina, New South Wales

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brewarrina is a small town (2001 population: 1,197^[1] ) in North West New South Wales, Australia on the banks of the Darling/Barwon River in Brewarrina Shire. It is 98 km east of Bourke and west of Walgett on the Kamilaroi Highway, and 808km from Sydney. In earlier times Brewarrina was one of the great inter-tribal meeting places of eastern Australia with the fishing traps, known in the Aboriginal language as Ngunnhu, sustaining thousands of Aboriginal people during tribal gatherings held prior to European settlement. The fisheries are estimated to be at least 40,000 years old and could be the oldest man-made structure on earth. Brewarrina is well known for its fishing.

[edit] History

The town is located amid the traditional lands of the Ngemba, Muwarrari and Yualwarri peoples. The area has a long Indigenous Australian history and was once the meetings grounds for over 5,000 people. The inhabitants built extensive fish traps that survived for thousands of years and are now a tourist attraction.

No one knows exactly what the word "Brewarrina" means. There are five competing interpretations of the name, several of them mutually exclusive. The most common translation is "clumps of acacias"; others are "where the gooseberry grows", "fishing", "acacia clumps" and, perhaps the most plausible, "place of gooseberries", coming from "warrina", meaning "place of", and "bre" or "burie" or "biree" meaning "gooseberries".

The first white settlers arrived in the district around 1839-40. The first people to own land where the town now stands were the Lawson brothers, who had two holdings - one called "Walcha" and another called "Moona". The first name given to the settlement was "Walcha Hut" but this later changed to "Fishery" and finally to "Brewarrina". In 1859 a riverboat called Gemini, skippered by William Randell, reached the town. This opened up the possibility of developing the town as a port, and by the early 1860s Brewarrina was recognised as the furthest navigable point on the Darling River. The town was formally surveyed and laid out in 1861, and proclaimed on 28 April 1863.

The 1870s were something of a boom time for Brewarrina. The Mechanics Institute was formed in 1873. The following year two hotels, two stores and the Commercial Bank all opened, and in 1875 a public school was established. All this development was largely due to Cobb and Co, which had a number of coach services passing through the town. There was a service from Byrock, one from Dubbo via Warren and, in 1874, a direct service from Brewarrina to Enngonia, north of Bourke. The number of people moving through the town at this time would have been considerable and would have given rise to the increase in stores and hotels.