Larger game animals such as kangaroos were hunted by the men, roasted in an earth oven, formed by a shallow hole in the ground, containing ash and charcoal.
[1] Congregational, Methodist and later Anglican missionary, John Brown Gribble, founded the mission settlement to give Aboriginal people a permanent home.
[7] Warangesda was set up after the model of Maloga and earlier mission settlements, as an attempt to create a managed farming community out of the local Aboriginal population.
By the 1870s, the Wiradjuri lived in groups of several related families as in traditional times, but some were able to work for settlers, taking government and station handouts when necessary.
Gribble, a miner[citation needed] who became a missionary, was deeply affected by his observation of the exploitation of Aboriginal women in the Riverina of NSW in the early 1870s.
To the amazement of his friends, Gribble decided to leave his comfortable posting at Jerilderie and in 1880 arrived at a parcel of land on the Murrumbidgee whose lease had been revoked.
[8] The name for the mission was chosen around the fireside one evening, combining "Warang" the Wiradjuri word for "camp" and "esda", the last part of the scriptural "Bethesda" (Hebrew meaning "house of mercy").
[10] Whereas Gribble saw the mission as a way of protecting Aboriginal women from 'the white man's horrible passions' (which resulted in) ...traffic in the bodies and souls of the poor blacks'.
Although there was a school at Warangesda, the dormitory followed the institutional model of its time, and taught housekeeping skills to the girls to prepare them for respectable employment in menial duties at nearby stations.
The retaining of management in white hands, the assimilation in church and school and the removal of children to dormitories away from parental influence, were standard methods employed by conservative settlement missionaries, such as Gribble.
A 1908 traveller described the Mission as comprising:[19] "... 810 hectares (2,000 acres) of land on which have been erected church, school, superintendent's residence, about a score of cottages for the blacks, and also a girls' dormitory.
Within ten years of the manager being issued with pistol and handcuffs, the people of Warangesda had been expelled, the contents of their mission auctioned off, and the land offered to new settlers.
We were all given rations: bags of meat, flour, baking powder, sugar, tea, salt, milk, soap, candles, and some had kerosene, the Mission gave them quite a lot of things and all free.
Mrs Gribble's cousin (Mr. Carpenter) who was employed as the mission schoolmaster, contracted a chill whilst duck shooting and died a few days later from a respiratory infection.
A government official visiting in the year of the 1891 floods, noted that wind blew through the slabs of the girls' dormitory and that with the damp weather many people had colds which could turn into consumption.
[1] By 1920, according to Peter Read, a total of 41 men had been expelled, mostly on the grounds of breaking the station regulations, and possibly over a third of children at Warangesda had been put in institutions.
The mission settlement site has remained part of the Kings' farm but was largely abandoned, used mainly for shed storage and stock grazing.
Much of the present day Narrandera Aboriginal community is linked by kinship ties which can be traced back to the Bamblett family at Warangesda Mission in the 1880s.
[1] Following the closure of Warangesda Aboriginal station in 1925, the refugee households arrived at a former Cobb and Co. stop outside of Narrandera and set up the Sandhills community camp.
Outside the site is a pepper tree row, until recently an avenue, along the original approach into the mission, and scatters of household wares in ploughed fields.
In the late afternoon in autumn, the relics of levees and shallow depressions indicating post holes and toilet pits suddenly appear.
A comparison of the materials used and the technology of their construction indicates that they dates substantially from the mission period, undergoing later modification and adaptation to new uses in the King farm.
A floor plan sketched in 1897 following a fire which destroyed the kitchen shows the new schoolmaster's cottage alongside the original slab hut.
These included small fragments of children's slates; the top of a large stoneware ink-pot; and a number of cast iron elbows which are similar to the school desk frames illustrated in 1883.
Frames from the girls dormitory beds appear variously as gates, portions offences and animal pens, sump covers and the like, scattered throughout the mission site.
Shearing clips, baling windlass, wool press and engine, represented by the cooling tank are all part of this assemblage, one piece of which was found at the church site.
[1] Modifications to the site fall into clear phases, these being the original Christian mission (1880 – 1884), the government run Aboriginal Station (1884 – 1926), homestead occupation by Stewart King (1927 – 1957) and subsequent agricultural land use by his descendants (1957 to present day).
The remains at this place provide a unique insight into the planning and development of a Christian mission and Aboriginal station in late 19th and early 20th century NSW.
The Cootamundra Home is highly significant because it was the central destination for Aboriginal girls across the whole of NSW who were removed from their families for training (the "stolen generations").
The remains at this place provide a unique insight into the planning and development of a Christian mission and Aboriginal station in late 19th and early 20th century NSW.