Cora Gooseberry was wife to King Bungaree and was an identity in Sydney for 20 years after his death.

She was known as ‘Queen of Sydney and Botany’ and ‘Queen of Sydney to South Head’ and was often seen wrapped in a government issued blanket, her head covered with a scarf and a clay pipe in her mouth sitting with her family and other Aboriginal people camped on the footpath outside the Cricketer’s Arms, a hotel on the corner of Pitt and Market Streets in Sydney. She befriended Edward Borton, the owner of the hotel who later owned the Sydney Arms Hotel in Castlereagh Street where he allowed Cora Gooseberry to sleep at nights, and where she was eventually found dead at the age of 75. Borton paid for a gravestone and her burial in the Presbyterian section of the Devonshire Street Cemetery (now covered by Central Railway).

At the time she was thought to be the last of the Guringais to survive, but it later became evident that the descendants of the Guringais had joined remnant Aboriginal language groups to enable their survival. Her gravestone was transferred to the Pioneers Cemetery at Botany. Her portraits by Charles Rodius and William Henry Fernybough (made in 1834) and her breast plate are at the Mitchell Library at the State Library of NSW.

In 1815 Macquarie began presenting selected Aboriginal men and women with brass breastplates. On 22 December 1816, Macquarie ordered Captain Gill, Acting Engineer to make ‘Six Gorgets or Breastplates with Chains for Native Chiefs … according to the former Size & Form’. Modelled on the gorgets worn by military officers, they were engraved with the recipient's name, tribe and title, either 'chief', 'king' or 'queen'. Breastplates continued to be conferred until as late as 1930.

Cora Gooseberry (d. 1852) was a wife of Bungaree, who had received a breastplate naming him 'Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe'. Governor Macquarie dubbed them with these fictitious titles in an attempt to create Aboriginal ‘leaders’ with whom he could negotiate, illustrating how little Europeans understood about the complex structures of Indigenous society.

The brass breastplate, engraved: 'Cora Gooseberry, Freeman Bungaree, Queen of Sydney & Botany' can be found in the State Library's collection. (Call No. R 251b)

Frederick Wymark, of Angus & Robertson, Booksellers, regularly visited David Scott Mitchell when he was bedridden at the end of his life. During one visit, Mitchell described this mug to him and said that it had been given to Gooseberry to collect her allowance of rum. Mitchell then asked Wymark to hand it down to him and he held it in deep admiration and contemplation for about five minutes before passing it back.