Hidden No More — Part One, Milbona, Corumba and Lulu: the beginning of the search

Brian AJ Newman LLB

23 hours ago

10 min read

There are some family histories that are handed down in complete sentences.

There are names spoken at the kitchen table, photographs placed carefully in albums, dates written in the margins and stories repeated so often that children grow up believing they will always be there.

Then there are the histories that survive in fragments.

A name written differently in one record and another. A woman described by a European name. A birthplace guessed rather than recorded. A family line that appears in a tree, disappears from a government document and then reappears in an old photograph or the memory of an Elder.

My family history belongs partly to that second category.

It is a history of survival, movement, silence and rediscovery. It is also a history of Aboriginal people whose identities were repeatedly translated, renamed, classified and sometimes hidden from the generations who came after them.

This is Part One of Hidden No More, a series about turning back time, investigating how and why Aboriginal identity was obscured, and recovering the stories that remained beneath the official record.

This beginning takes me to Milbona and Corumba, and to their daughter Lulu.

Hidden No More — Part One, Milbona, Corumba and Lulu: the beginning of the search

Milbona and Corumba

The family records I have been working through identify Milbona as Wiradjuri and Corumba as Ngarigo. Their daughter was Lulu, also recorded as Mary Ann or Mary Ann Coram Mah-Rah-Kah.

The family-tree material places Lulu’s birth around 1820 at Armidale, on what is now recognised as Anaiwan country. It identifies Milbona as Milbona Dunghutti Barra, a Wiradjuri woman, and Corumba as an Aboriginal man associated with the Ngarigo people. The record describes both parents as being about twenty years old when Lulu was born.

Those few lines carry an enormous amount of history.

They place a Wiradjuri woman and a Ngarigo man in the New England region during a period when colonial expansion was rapidly changing Aboriginal life. They place their daughter on Anaiwan Country. They give us a name by which she can be found, but they also show us how easily a person can become divided between names, descriptions and systems of recording.

Milbona and Corumba were not simply entries in a family tree. They were people who carried lore, family, language, memory and belonging through a violent period of Australian history.

Their lives existed before the records that now attempt to describe them, and their lives were larger than the descriptions those records preserved.

The written record may tell us where Lulu was born or how an archive later classified her. It cannot fully tell us what Milbona knew, what Corumba remembered, what language they spoke to their daughter or what they understood about the future she would face.

That is why family-history research must be approached with humility. We are not discovering empty spaces. We are approaching lives that were already full before colonial paperwork tried to contain them.

https://youtu.be/iZI0almcQnk?si=gxoMFGPN2TPO6gpw

Lulu: a daughter of many names

Lulu is recorded in the family material as Lulu (Mary Ann) Coram Mah-Rah-Kah, with dates of approximately 1820 to 1865. Other historical material identifies a woman named Mary Ann as an Aboriginal woman from the Walcha area. It records that she had children with a European man, Maurice Quinn, and later connects the family to the Quinn and Duval lines.

The records do not speak with one consistent voice.

One source may call her Mary Ann. Another may describe her as Lulu. A family-tree entry may preserve Coram Mah-Rah-Kah. A later document may reduce her identity to a racial classification, a relationship to a European man or the name of a husband.

That inconsistency is not a minor inconvenience for a researcher. It is part of the evidence.

Aboriginal women were often recorded through colonial names, through the names of men connected to them or through descriptions imposed by officials who did not understand, respect or preserve their cultural identity. A person could be known within family and community by one name, recorded by a mission or government office under another and then remembered by later generations through a third.

Lulu’s story therefore requires us to hold more than one name at once.

She was Lulu.
She was Mary Ann.
She was recorded as Coram Mah-Rah-Kah.
She was the daughter of Milbona and Corumba.
She was an Aboriginal woman connected to Anaiwan Country and to the families who came before and after her.
She was not made less real because the records were inconsistent.

If anything, the contradictions remind us that the record was never neutral.

The photograph that made the past feel close

Among the images I have been studying is an old photograph captioned “Maurice Quinn and Aboriginal Maryann.” It is a small, imperfect image, but it carries the force of a doorway.

The photograph does not tell us everything. It does not explain the relationship. It does not tell us what Maryann called herself, what she believed, what she had endured or how she understood the world around her.

But it shows her presence.

She is not merely a line in a database. She is not a missing ancestor represented by a blank space. She was a woman who lived, formed relationships, carried family and left descendants who are still asking questions.

When I look at that photograph, I do not see an historical curiosity. I see someone whose life reached forward through time and arrived in mine.

The image also forces a difficult question: how much of Maryann’s identity was preserved, and how much was converted into a form that colonial society found easier to record?

The caption identifies her as “Aboriginal Maryann.” That may be useful to a researcher trying to locate the image, but it is not the whole of her identity. It tells us how someone else described her. It does not necessarily tell us how she understood herself.

That distinction matters.

For generations, Aboriginal people were often required to fit into descriptions created by people outside the culture. The record might say “Aboriginal,” “half-caste,” “native,” “domestic,” “station worker” or simply give a European name. Those descriptions may help us trace a person, but they should never be mistaken for the person themselves.

Anaiwan Country and the loss of language

The historical material I have been reading describes Anaiwan Country as the high country of the southern New England Tablelands. It also describes the Anaiwan language as part of a distinct language community whose speakers experienced an exceptionally rapid decline in language transmission after invasion and settlement.

That history is important to my family search.

Lulu was born into a world where Wiradjuri, Ngarigo and Anaiwan connections met. She was born on Anaiwan Country, and the family that followed was accepted into Anaiwan community and survived there across generations.

The loss of language was not evidence that Aboriginal people lacked culture. It was evidence of what happened to culture under pressure.

When children were separated from family, when families were pushed onto stations, when Aboriginal people were pressured to speak English, when names were altered and when openly identifying as Aboriginal could expose a person to discrimination, language transmission became dangerous and difficult.

Sometimes survival required silence.
Sometimes survival required a family to keep its identity within the home while presenting something different to the outside world.
Sometimes the next generation was told only enough to protect them, not enough to give them the complete story.

That is how identity can become hidden without ever truly disappearing.

The hidden does not mean the absent

For a long time, I understood my own identity through fragments.

I knew there was Aboriginal ancestry. I knew there were family stories. I knew there were connections that did not fit neatly into the simplified version of our history. But knowing that something existed is not the same as being given the language, records and confidence to name it.

The deeper I searched, the more I began to understand that silence is not the same as absence.

A missing document does not mean there was no family.
A European surname does not mean Aboriginal identity ended.
A person’s appearance does not determine their belonging.
A record that fails to name a people does not prove that the people were not there.

The gaps became questions rather than conclusions.

Who were Milbona and Corumba before they entered the record?
What did Lulu know about her parents?
What names did she carry that were not written down?
What stories were protected by silence?
What did her descendants inherit without being told where it came from?

The mark on my ribs

My own connection to this history is not only contained in documents.

I was born with a birthmark on my ribs shaped like a bat.

For years, it was simply a physical mark on my body. As I grew older and began to understand more about my Anaiwan heritage, the mark took on another meaning. It became part of the way I understood the connection between body, family, Country and identity.

The bat became more than an image.

It became a question.

It became a sign I could not easily ignore.

The Anaiwan name for bat that I have come to carry is Ngarradan. That name chose me before I consciously chose it. It became my totem—not because I wanted to invent an identity, but because it gave language to something I had felt long before I understood how to explain it.

I use the spelling Ngarradan as it has been carried to me. Aboriginal language spellings can vary across historical sources, dialects, orthographies and community usage. Related north-west New South Wales language resources record similar forms, including Ngarraadhaan, but that does not by itself establish an Anaiwan attribution. Language belongs with community, Elders and speakers, and I treat the word with that respect. (Winanga-li language resource)

For me, however, the meaning is deeply personal.

The bat moves through darkness without being defeated by it. It hears what others may not hear. It navigates spaces that are difficult to see. It returns to places that others may have forgotten.

That is how I now understand my own search.

I am moving through the darkness of incomplete records, inherited silence and lost language.

I am listening for what survived. I am trying to find the path back to the people whose names were changed, whose stories were compressed and whose descendants were sometimes left to discover themselves late in life.

The bat did not make me Aboriginal.

The birthmark did not create my ancestry.

But together, the mark and the name became part of the way I recognised a truth that had been present all along.

From Milbona and Corumba to me

When I place my own life beside the names of Milbona, Corumba and Lulu, I do not pretend that the distance between us has disappeared.

I cannot know everything they knew. I cannot restore every lost conversation. I cannot reconstruct every movement across Country or recover every word that was not written down.

But I can refuse to accept that the gaps are the end of the story.

Their daughter survived.

Their family continued.

The line reached through Anaiwan Country and through the generations that followed. It reached my grandmother, my family and me. It reached my daughters, who deserve to inherit more than silence.

That is why I am investigating.

Not to turn family history into a performance.

Not to claim certainty where the record remains incomplete.

Not to erase the complexity of Wiradjuri, Ngarigo and Anaiwan relationships.

I am investigating because the people who came before me deserved to be remembered as whole human beings.

I am investigating because identity should not be something that colonial paperwork is allowed to define and then withdraw.

I am investigating because my daughters and the generations after them should not mistake silence for absence.

Why the search matters now

Some people ask why family history matters if the past cannot be changed.

The answer is that the past continues to shape the present.

It shapes whether Aboriginal people feel entitled to name themselves. It shapes whether children grow up knowing where their families come from. It shapes whether a person feels they must prove an identity that should never have been hidden from them.

It shapes how communities are treated, how records are read and whose version of history is accepted without question.

When an Aboriginal family recovers a name, a photograph, a language word or a connection to Country, it is not merely adding information to a family tree. It is repairing a relationship between generations.

That repair may be incomplete. It may be painful. It may expose further questions. But it is still necessary.

The search also belongs to the broader work of truth-telling. Australia cannot speak honestly about reconciliation while Aboriginal families are still trying to reconstruct identities that were obscured by the systems imposed upon them.

Truth-telling begins with the willingness to look closely at the records, including what they omit, how they describe Aboriginal people and whose interests those descriptions served.

Hidden No More

This series begins with Milbona, Corumba and Lulu because every search has to begin somewhere.

For me, it begins with a Wiradjuri woman, a Ngarigo man and their daughter, whose life became connected to Anaiwan Country. It continues through Mary Ann, Maurice Quinn, the Duval line, my family, my daughters and the identity I have spent years learning to name.

It continues through an old photograph, a damaged record, a family-tree entry, a memorial, a language page and the memories carried by people who refused to let everything disappear.

The records may be incomplete.

The names may be inconsistent.

The history may have been buried under other people’s classifications.

But buried is not erased.

Silenced is not forgotten.

Hidden is not gone.

I am turning back time—not to live in the past, but to recover what the future needs.

I am searching so my daughters and the generations after them can know that their identity was never created by a document, a government category or another person’s permission.

It was carried.

It survived.

It found its way back.

And now it is hidden no more.

My search and certainty of identity is underpinned by DNA that runs deep, but that does little more than confirm the deliberate stories I heard as a boy and the private stories that were whispered barely loud enough for me to hear and keep safe, as we truly were hidden from ourselves..

A note about sources and family history

This article is part of a personal family-history and truth-telling project. It draws on family-tree research, historical publications, archival images, photographs, memorial material, oral history and personal interpretation.

The records concerning Lulu/Mary Ann contain variations in names, dates, birthplace and descriptions. Those variations are identified openly rather than concealed. Further research, community knowledge and consultation with appropriate Elders and language custodians will continue to refine the account.

The purpose of this series is not to replace community authority or archival research. It is to bring the search into the open and to encourage others to investigate the histories that were hidden from their families.