Woollarawarre Bennelong[a] (c. 1764 – 3 January 1813) was a senior man of the Eora, an Aboriginal Australian people of the Port Jackson area, at the time of the first British settlement in Australia.

He had several sisters, Wariwéar, Karangarang, Wûrrgan and Munânguri, who married important men from nearby clans, thereby creating political links for their brother.

[7] Bennelong was brought to the settlement at Sydney Cove in November 1789 by order of the governor, Arthur Phillip, who was under instructions from King George III to establish relationships with the indigenous populations.

[8][9] Bennelong was captured with Colebee on 25 November 1789 as part of Phillip's plan to learn the language and customs of the local people.

[10] At the time of his capture, Bennelong's age was estimated at 25, and he was described as being "of good stature, stoutly made", with a "bold, intrepid countenance".

[citation needed] Willemering was a kurdaitcha from Broken Bay, and it has been suggested by some historians that he had been enlisted by Bennelong to carry out payback for the latter's sense of personal injury on having been kidnapped.

[citation needed] However, their association remained tense after Bennelong's friend, Bangai, was shot dead near Dawe's Point by soldiers in December 1790 for his supposed role in stealing potatoes.

[16][page needed] Bennelong and another Aboriginal man, named Yemmerrawanne (or Imeerawanyee), travelled with Phillip on Atlantic to England, boarding on 10 December 1792.

Bass nursed him back to health and in exchange Bennelong taught him a sufficient amount of Dharug to enable the former to communicate with the indigenous Eora on arriving in Sydney.

[24][25][page needed] After this incident, Bennelong became a disreputable person amongst the colonists, being described as "a most insolent and troublesome savage" whose retaliatory action of spearing a soldier had "rendered him more hateful than any of his countrymen".

[24] Despite the disparaging view the colonists held toward Bennelong, by the early 1800s he had become the leader of a 100-strong group of Aboriginal people, remnants of the dispossessed Port Jackson clans, living on the north side of the Parramatta River to the west of Kissing Point in Wallumedagal country.

[26][27] He died on 3 January 1813 at Kissing Point on the Parramatta River in Sydney and was buried in the orchard of the brewer James Squire, a friend to Bennelong and his clan.

[28] His death notice in the Sydney Gazette was dismissive,[c] insisting that "he was a thorough savage, not to be warped from the form and character that nature gave him"—which reflected the feelings of some in Sydney's white society that Bennelong had abandoned his role as ambassador in his last years, and also reflects the deteriorating relations between the two groups as more and more land was cleared and fenced for farming, and the hardening attitudes of many colonists towards "savages" who were not willing to give up their country and become labourers and servants useful to the colonists.

[34] In November 2018, the New South Wales Government announced that it had bought the house and would turn the site into a public memorial to Bennelong, together with a museum commemorating the impact of British colonisation on the Aboriginal people of the Sydney area.

[40] In recent decades, he has been defended, as someone who saw the best and worst of Western civilization and, having done so, rejected it, recreating a modified form of traditional lifestyle at Kissing Point.

[16][page needed] His on-again, off-again friendship with the British governors ultimately saw other Aboriginal people being brought into contact with the colony at Sydney.

In contributing to some of the first cross-cultural communication between the groups, he helped establish a tenuous peace between the Eora and the British that enabled some Aboriginal people to continue to exist as survivors in their own colonised land.

[citation needed] Actor Jacob Junior Nayinggul portrayed Bennelong in reenactment sequences in the 2022 documentary series The Australian Wars.