Billy Moore

Country

The Tweed Regional Museum describes Billy Moore as a man of the Tulgigin clan of the Tweed, and records the belief that he was born near Currumbin in the 1860s (Fox, n.d.). Looking back in 1946, the Tweed pioneer George Osborne, then 90, also thought he came from Currumbin ("Pioneer recalls", 1946).

A man of great skill

Osborne remembered him as a tall man, 6 feet 5 inches, who was ranked as a great warrior and hunter and who excelled with the axe. He called him "one of the best trackers on the Tweed", and said his "skill in throwing a boomerang was uncanny" ("Pioneer recalls", 1946).

He felled scrub for Osborne's father on land along Boatharbour Road, and the museum says he cleared much of the Nobby's Creek area for the Osborne family ("Pioneer recalls", 1946; Fox, n.d.). At his death the Tweed Daily noted that he was well known on the lower river, where he had worked for many farmers ("Death of an Aboriginal", 1924). He is remembered as the last man on the Tweed who could climb any kind of tree using only a small Aboriginal axe and a length of vine (Fox, n.d.).

Family and friends

Osborne recalled that Billy Moore had two sons, Dunnie and Coolum, and that his closest friend was a man called Long Jimmy ("Pioneer recalls", 1946).

The breastplate

Settlers gave Billy Moore a brass breastplate inscribed "Billy Moore, the famous Tweed Aboriginal" ("News sought", 1946). Osborne was careful to add that, although he owned a brass plate, Billy Moore "was not 'King'" ("Pioneer recalls", 1946). As the museum notes, breastplates were settler honours that "were not necessarily recognised or endorsed by Aboriginal community groups themselves" (Fox, n.d.).

Years after his death a boy looking for bait worms in Bray's Scrub, near Murwillumbah, turned over a log and found the plate, with a boomerang lying beside it ("News sought", 1946). In 1946 both were shown in a shop window in Murwillumbah's Main Street ("News sought", 1946). They are now in the Tweed Regional Museum; the hardwood boomerang still carries the marks of the blades used to shape it (Fox, n.d.).

Death and burial

Billy Moore died on Ukerebagh Island, Tweed Heads, on 13 October 1924, of a kidney illness then called Bright's disease ("Death of an Aboriginal", 1924; Fox, n.d.). The Tweed Daily reported that his own people buried him at Tweed Heads two days later ("Death of an Aboriginal", 1924). Other accounts say he lies in the hills, behind the North Arm or around Nobby's Creek ("Pioneer recalls", 1946; Fox, n.d.).