Aboriginal Culture, Heritage
& Arts Association of NSW

Bunyun Miirlarl is a story of the now named Corambirra point, the quarry at the Coffs Harbour southern break wall. A highly significant and special place to the Gumbaynggirr people and a sacred women’s place, although it has been recorded (verbally) as a place for men to also visit in certain circumstances. Not only did Bunyun Miirlarl have significance to us, but we also shared this with our neighbouring clans for the safe arrival of our babies, ceremony, seasonal foods etc.
Bunyun Miirlarl had a freshwater spring that would reach to the very top and caves that were hidden under the ocean’s line. She was special, she still is. I have so many mixed emotions when it comes to this place, knowing that my Gumbaynggirr people had to not only be forced from the area and barred from using it but had to bear witness to the explosions, cutting and removal of pieces while placed in a camp only a few hundred meters away. I feel loss. My mother, her mother, me and my children loss. When we feel that pull to connect with Bunyun Miirlarl we carefully walk over the parts of her that are buried beneath the bitumen, so that we can sit and listen to the same wind and ocean that heard the (pre-colonial) first cries of our babies, songs of ceremony and laughter. Don’t be fooled, there is literal blood on your hands and now mine. It is part of our history of Coffs Harbour formerly, Garlimburla.
Published in Saltwater Freshwater Art Award & Contemporary Cultural Objects 2021, Page 30
Tori Donnelly
White Wash, 2020
I often visit Bunyun Miirlarl now known as Corrambirra Point and imagine how it may have looked and felt before 1917. It is a known sacred place and yet there is no transparency in written history of how the island became occupied by foreign peoples and eventually labelled a quarry. This is a women’s place as told in the sunrise, depth of an ocean to represent how in an instant thousands of years of repetition can be lost. White represented here alike to smoke and mirrors so you can’t see the blood of my people through the cracks.