Jewish and Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander people have walked together on this land since the earliest days of colonisation.
Joseph Mayer, a Jewish convict on the 2nd fleet, married an Aboriginal woman from NSW. He was a pioneer of the timber industry and is buried at Bulahdeelah. Learn more here.
Thomas Beeton was a Jewish convict who later became a sealer and married a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman. Their daughter, Lucy Beeton, was a successful and well-known educator, trader and businesswoman.
Jewish American Civil War veteran ‘Yankee Ned’ Mosby settled on Maisy Island in the Torres Strait in the mid 1800s and married a Torres Strait Islander woman. One of their descendants is Torres Strait Islander artist Glen Mackie.
Early settler Isaac Nathan (1790-1864) was the first white musician to study and record Aboriginal Music seriously. In 1849, he published the Southern Euphrosyne in London and Sydney, with sections devoted to Aboriginal people and their music. The best-known of these pieces is 1842’s Koorinda Braia, “The Aboriginal Mother,” with words by the Aboriginal poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796-1880) and music by Nathan.
Koorinda Braia (1842) by Isaac Nathan (1792-1864)