John Allen

Wangerriburra Country

John Allen's own name was Bullumm (Allen & Lane, 1914). He was born about 1850, and he was Wangerriburra, of the people whose Country ran "from Cedar Creek on the north to the Macpherson Range on the south", taking in Tamborine Mountain and the valleys of the Coomera, Canungra and Albert rivers (Allen & Lane, 1914; "Obituary: John Allen", 1931).

Children were expected to speak their own language, but Bullumm "soon got to know his mother's tongue, and also to speak the dialects of the neighbouring tribes" (Allen & Lane, 1914). His earliest memory was of troopers firing on his people at Mount Wetheren, and of being carried to cover (Allen & Lane, 1914). He told of other killings in those years, but felt "that no good could result by recalling the many memories of cruelty, oppression, and bloodshed of his early days" (Allen & Lane, 1914).

With the Collins family

In 1861 John Collins's sheep came through Ipswich on their way to Waterton, near Taroom. The boy recognised the drovers, jumped on one of the horses and went with them, and he stayed with the Collins family of Mundoolun for the rest of his life ("Obituary: John Allen", 1931). Sources put his age then at about 10 to 12 (Allen & Lane, 1914; Hinchcliffe, 1931).

As a boy with the Collins wool teams he was in Brisbane in 1865 when the foundation stone of the first Victoria Bridge was laid, and he later told how the cannon salute sent him tumbling from his perch ("Laying a stone", 1934).

A pioneer of the west

John Lane called him "a thorough bushman and a pioneer of Western Queensland" (Allen & Lane, 1914). He went with Robert Collins on long expeditions into the west, and two places near Boulia carry his name: Allen's Hole, a waterhole below the town, and Allen's Gap, where the Boulia to Winton mail road passes through ("Obituary: John Allen", 1931). At one time he held the Boulia to Winton mail contract, worth £1,000 a year (Allen & Lane, 1914). In the west he also witnessed the Bora of the Maranoa people, which they called cumba (Allen & Lane, 1914).

The language record

In 1913, in his sixties, Bullumm worked with John Lane, the headmaster at Jimboomba, to set down the grammar, vocabulary and place names of the Wangerriburra (Allen & Lane, 1914). Lane wrote that Bullumm searched for "the since unspoken language of boyhood": "Many a word has been puzzled over for weeks; others for months" (Allen & Lane, 1914). Anything doubtful was left out, and Lane added, "I am absolutely sure of Bullumm's thorough honesty in giving the information" (Allen & Lane, 1914).

Lane described a man who "speaks excellent English, reads fluently, writes well, and is conversant with all the common topics of the day" (Allen & Lane, 1914). Their work was printed in 1914 as an appendix to the Chief Protector's annual report, and the report refers its readers to a map (Allen & Lane, 1914); the Nation's A Century of Mapping lists their map of about 1913. More than a century later it is still the core record of the language, and around 1,000 of his words went into the Yugambeh language app in 2013 (Crump, 2013).

Later life at Mundoolun

Bullumm lived at Mundoolun Station, "in the midst of the country once hunted over by his ancestors", and in his last years in a cottage there (Allen & Lane, 1914; "Life of Hon. Robert M. Collins", 1923). Local people went to him for the meanings of place names. One writer remembered that "the late John Allen, of Mundoolun, was my authority" for the name Tamborine, "yam in a cliff", "and he showed me the place which his ancestors had named" (Hannah, 1936).

He died at Mundoolun on 15 January 1931, in his 81st year, and his funeral was held at the Mundoolun church ("Obituary: John Allen", 1931). He is buried in the Mundoolun Cemetery (Logan City Council, n.d.). His death was reported in newspapers across Queensland and northern New South Wales ("Death of John Allen", 1931).