Simon Wonga
Aboriginal Australian leader in the Melbourne area in early colonial Victoria (1824-1874)
Simon Wonga (c. 1824–1874), ngurungaeta and son of Billibellary, was an elder of the Wurundjeri people, who lived in the Melbourne area of Australia before European settlement. He was resolute that his people would survive the "onslaught" of white men.
Life
In 1835, he was present when his father and other Wurundjeri elders met with John Batman and witnessed the signing of the historically contentious "treaty" which heralded the establishment of a permanent British colony in Victoria.
In 1840 Wonga injured his foot in the Dandenongs. Billibellary searched for him, and when found carried him to a homestead where he was transported back to Melbourne by dray to be cared for and have his wound dressed for a period of two months by Assistant Protector William Thomas and wife Susannah.
His father died in 1846 and by 1851 he was recognised leader, the ngurungaeta or headman of the Wurundjeri and Kulin people.
By 1848 he had joined the Native Police Corp and led armed and mounted units conducting licence hunts with Captain Dana during the early years of Victoria's gold rush. After the Corps were disbanded in 1853, he worked with Colonel Joseph Anderson, Joseph Panton, Alfred Selwyn, Robert Brough Smyth, and as an occasional guide for landscape painters Eugene Von Guerard, Nicholas Chevalier and later with Louis Buvelot. He was a regular guest of Lilly and Paul de Castella at Yering Station while his family took refuge upstream on the Yarra River around Woori Yallock-Launching Place.
The public source identifies “Simon Wonga” as aboriginal Australian leader in the Melbourne area in early colonial Victoria (1824-1874). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Simon, Wonga and Aboriginal.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q2287928. VIAF identifies the subject as 8705148390853810830007. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1824, 1874, 1835 and 1840.
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This entry incorporates text from “Simon Wonga” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.