Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Yoo-long Erah-ba-diang (No. 4)

Yoo-long Erah-ba-diang (No. 4)

An account of the English colony in New South Wales with remarks on the dispositions, customs, manners, &c. of the native inhabitants of that country …, 1798
David Collins (author) and James Neagle (engraver) after unknown artist (possibly Thomas Watling)
Q79/60 v. 1, Appendix VI, pp 566–581, Engraving

A gathering of the Eora for the Yoo-long Erah-ba-diang or ‘ceremony or operation of drawing the tooth’, took place in early February 1795 at Wogganmagully (Farm Cove), now part of the Royal Botanic Gardens. In this rite of passage, boys were made men after ordeals that concluded when their upper right tooth was knocked out ...
Keith Vincent Smith, Eora: Mapping Aboriginal Sydney 1770–1850, 2006

From his own records Collins completed in May 1798 the first volume of An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales … some of them after drawings by Thomas Watling. It was more complete in detail than earlier works on the colony, and claimed as its object the dissuasion of his countrymen from regarding New South Wales with ‘odium and disgust’. (Australian Dictionary of Biography)


Deputy judge advocate David Collins (1756–1810) sailed in the Sirius with the First Fleet, arriving at Botany Bay on 20 January 1788.

The deputy judge advocate was the senior legal officer of the colony and functioned in many ways as a Chief Justice.