Aboriginal history of the Paterson Valley

Baiame is the keeper of the Hunter Valley and the ancestral being of the Aboriginal people of the Valley. He created the earth and sent other spirits to form and inhabit the natural features of the land. Baiame created the first laws by which Aboriginal people lived and these were unchanged through thousands of years of Aboriginal life in the Valley. He imparted the knowledge, lore and ceremony necessary for successful existence as he journeyed among the people before returning to the sky.

There were several Aboriginal nations in the Hunter Valley at the time of European arrival. The Awabakal people lived on the southern side of the Coquon (Hunter River) while the Wonnarua lived to north west and the Worimi to the north east. It is possible that the Yimmang (Paterson River) formed the dividing line between the territories of the Wonnarua and Worimi people. James Miller, a descendant of the Gringai Clan of the Wonnarua people, believes the area around the current village of Paterson was part of their territory^[1] and his view is supported by other sources.

There were four phases of European occupation of the Paterson River Valley, and each subsequent phase had an increased impact on Aboriginal life and culture. The first phase involved minimal contact as Europeans sought to explore the Hunter Valley, a notable example of which is the 1801 survey of the Paterson River by Ensign Barrallier.^[2]

In the second phase, beginning in 1804, gangs of convict timber-cutters from the penal settlement at Newcastle were the principal form of European contact with Aboriginal people in the Paterson area. The gangs operated along the Paterson River and established a camp at Old Banks. This phase of contact had little impact on areas available to Aborigines for hunting or on availability of food and materials but may have impacted through inter-racial sexual relations and the introduction of European diseases.

The third phase involved small-scale settlement of a handful of Europeans on the river at Patersons Plains, these farmers holding their land at Governor Macquarie's pleasure (for details see overview of settlement to the end of 1821). Given the low number of settlers and the small areas of land involved, this probably had little impact on the local Aboriginal people.

The fourth phase of European settlement of the Paterson Valley involved large-scale alienation of land from 1822 as individual settlers were granted up to several thousand acres each. By 1825 most of the prime alluvial land along the lower reaches of the Paterson River has been granted to European immigrants. This scale of settlement drastically reduced the hunting areas of the Wonnarua and Worimi, restricted their supply of game and materials, and further exposed them to European diseases against which they had little or no immunity.

In the 1830s Aboriginal numbers in the Lower Hunter declined markedly, and mortalities in a smallpox epidemic from 1829 to 1831 may have exceeded 30 per cent of the Aboriginal population. After this epidemic Aborigines survived in numbers only in the Upper Hunter but not in the Lower Hunter area (which includes the Paterson River valley).

Throughout the phases of Indigenous/European contact there were varying degrees of conflict and accommodation, although conflict in the Lower Hunter was sporadic rather than sustained. The intercultural exchanges were diverse, fluid and ambivalent – some involved violence but there was also cooperation, companionship and sharing of knowledge.