People involved

This data has not yet been gathered. Research work is ongoing. To help, please consider donating or contact us to volunteer or about setting up research projects in your area.

Event mentions

• Abduction and retaliation killings
  1 Sep 1824 – 31 Dec 1824 — Brymair Valley
  The Dabee (and possibly other people, including the Bogee) were together in the Brymair Valley in 1824. One of these ‘men of the Dabees’ was later known as Jimmy Lambert or ‘“King Jimmy” of the Dabee Tribe’. In 1824, Jimmy was a young ‘stripling’, fourteen years old. At some point around this time, Jimmy was ‘camped in the Brima Valley’ with his Dabee people when two white stockmen in a ‘nearby hut’ held a young Dabee woman for three days, until ‘she escaped and got back to her people in a dreadful condition’. The ‘men of the Dabees’ then ‘carried out their tribal law — killed the stock-men, burned down the hut and killed and ate most of the sheep’.
  Source: ‘M. Lambert’ told the story of the massacre to the Tribune newspaper as it had been passed down through her family. Her grandfather was the Dabee man Jimmy Lambert, who had ‘a bullet which he had carried in his leg all his life, a bullet he got when Redcoats fired on the Blacks’. His wife, Peggy, later called ‘Queen Peggy’ by Rylstone locals, was living by the Cudgegong River when she died in 1885. Jimmy lived for a time in a hut on a hillside of the Brymair Valley. As ‘M. Lambert’ wrote: ‘That this is a true version of what happened so long ago, I have no doubt; the story was told to my father by his mother who was a step-daughter of King Jimmy’. ‘POEM RECALLS TROOPS’ CRUEL MASSACRE Contributed by M. Lambert’, Tribune, 26 April 1961, p. 7. Emma Syme’s ‘Great Great Grandmother’s name was Madge Green’; she used the name ‘M. Lambert’ because the Tribune was a socialist newspaper. According to Emma some Bogee people survived by using an ‘escape route’ – a pass out of the Brymair Valley and into the Cudgegong Valley. Emma Syme (North-East Wiradjuri Co), pers. comm., 8 November 2020. ‘Queen Peggy deceased’, Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 26 August 1885, p. 3. Peter Swain and Ray Agnew, interview, 28 January 2021. In an ode to ‘The Dying Chief’, H. H Lublin wrote that ‘he was both esteemed and respected by the settlers in the west’. ‘Original Poetry. “The Dying Chief”’, Leader, 23 February 1895, p. 31. Peter Swain, interview, 7 December 2020. It seems there were three or four massacres in the area: Dabee, ‘Brima’, Bogee and another near Glen Alice. Emma Syme, interview, 28 January 2021; Martin DeLauney, interview, 27 February 2021