Crossing the Ngunitiji: Clarence clear water

Clarence River at Yamba (photo: Derek Barry)
Clarence River at Yamba (photo: Derek Barry)

On the eastern edge of the Great Dividing Range, near the border between NSW and Queensland, a small stream quickly gathers pace as it slithers down the mountains. It is an area of good rains and picks up lots of tributaries in the Dorrigo Plateau. By the time it reaches the valleys, it is large and broad, the widest Australian river to enter the Pacific.

At its estuary the river is a majestic kilometre wide. The ferry from Yamba in the south to Iluka in the north takes 30 minutes to negotiate the dangerous channels, islands and sandbars. Most Australians know it as the Clarence but to the Yaegl and Bundjalung people (collectively the Yaygirr) that lived in this valley the river was called the Ngunitiji.

The Yaygirr had a good lifestyle for at least 6000 years, so much so they could afford to set up roots and live in bark huts with woven vines. At nighttime they gathered around to tell the story of the old woman Dirrangan who was swept down the river during a flood holding on to a fig tree. But it was the Yaygirr who would eventually be swept away when newcomers coveted the river and its fertile land.

These ghostly white people were initially slow to see the river’s significance. Cook missed it on his 1770 trip. Matthew Flinders found the bark huts when he landed at the mouth of the Ngunitiji during his second voyage in 1799. He called the area Shoal Bay but was unimpressed by the shifting sandbars and failed to see he was at the mouth of a major flow, calling it “a small opening like a river”.


In 1830 one escapee “Sheik” Jack Brown made it to Yaygirr country where he lived with locals for two years. When he returned to Moreton Bay he told of a great river which “abounds with fish”. Its land was abundant in “emus, kangaroos, and wild fowl in all directions” and “pine, oak, gum and other trees of use” were growing there. Brown excited the imagination of would-be settlers looking for easy pickings among apparently friendly natives.

Captain Alexander Butcher took the Eliza into the estuary and mapped 200km up the river. His report finally got Sydney’s attention. Explorer Joseph Hickey Grose decided to verify Butcher’s findings the following year and he reported back to deputy-surveyor Samuel Perry about “the future opening of the country on the banks of the river”.

The schooner Susan also left Sydney in 1838 with a party of sawyers looking for cedar. It was not a good wood for building houses or boats so the men lived in tent-huts, surviving on beef, flour, tea and sugar. Three times a year they went to the new settlement at what would become Grafton where there were complaints about drunken behaviour. Though the cedar was quickly exhausted, many stayed to try their hand at farming.







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