Gilburri
On Sunday 24 April, 1842, Fahy was able to escape again. One news report, written over sixty years after Fahy’s escape that day, said that he was able to knock out their obnoxious overseer, and commit him to a miserable death tied down to an ant's nest.
Over 80 years later Meston was to repeat the same story in his article Life Among Blacks. Convict records list only one man escaping from that area in April 1842, and that was John Fahy.
Fahy was able to move quickly into the bush and turned north, and according to a later deposition: “….came to the Darling Downs with the drays…”. Once on the Downs, he joined up and was accepted into clan life. He was classified as an escapee the following month, and his description was published as : “….5 foot 9 inches, brown complexion, brown hair, brown eyes, small scar on right side of under lip, a mole and D under left arm, JF inside lower right arm, scar on left elbow, three scars on left knee…”
As an outsider, the Clan would be suspicious of this outsider, but his life was spared by one of the oldest chiefs of that Clan. “Lie down black fella, wake up white fella”, he was later to say explaining how he was thought to be the reincarnation of an old chief’s son that had been killed in battle. Over time he received that clan’s traditional body marking and scaring, and took the name, Gilburri ; the name according to Archibald Meston means Bellbird. These unmistakable Bora marks on his breast and left shoulder, clear proof that he had been through that ceremony, called Boorool in the Bunya country, and he referred to it in the most respectful and flattering terms. Boorool is the term used for man making ceremonies.
There is another explanation to the meaning of the name Gilburri from linguist, Des Crump at Queensland State Library. He looked at the Warwick/Gidhabal wordlists, and made the assement that gil/kil was the shortened for to die or be dead, while buri means to come back.This may well refer to Gilburri initially being sentenced to death by the Downs elders, and then saved by his adopted father ; so bought back from the dead. 14 Then in late 1842 or early in 1843, Fahy’s host clan on the Darling Downs, received an invitation to attend the Bunya Mountains gatherings and take part in the great festival. Fahy went with the clan, and once in the Bunya country met up with people from the Kabi Nation who adopted him in much the same way as Duramboi and Wandi had been years earlier- all in the same geographical Wide Bay area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilburri
