Bidgee Bidgee (c. 1787–c. 1837), a leader of the Burramattagal clan of the Dharug people, joined a number of sealing and whaling voyages to Bass Strait in the early 1800s, and acted as a tracker to an 1816 expedition aimed at quelling attacks against settlers in west and north-west Sydney. Bidgee Bidgee is held to have succeeded Bennelong, his half brother-in-law, as leader of the community centred near present-day Ryde on the Parramatta River, and in June 1816 Governor Macquarie issued him with a kingplate declaring him ‘chief of the Kissing Point tribe’.
This engraving is one of fourteen portraits published in the atlas accompanying the second edition of Voyage de Découvertes aux Terres Australes, the official account of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition. An English edition of the same portrait describes Bidgee Bidgee as ‘a well known character at Sydney, [who] speaks very good English and mimics the manners of every officer and person in the colony’.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2017
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