summer drew to an end, feasting on turtle was a prized occasion. In winter, one foraged for and hunted possum, echidna, fruit bats, wallaby and kangaroo. The Eora placed a time limit on formal battles engaged to settle inter-tribal grievances. Such fights were regulated to begin late in the afternoon, and to cease shortly after twilight. History The first Sydney-area contact occurred when James Cook's Endeavour anchored in Botany Bay. A drawing, thought recently to be the handiwork of the Polynesian navigator Tupaia who was on board Cook's ship, survives depicting Aboriginals in Botany Bay, around Kurnell. The Eora were at first bewildered by settlers wreaking havoc on their trees and landscape. After an early contact with the Tharawal, meetings with Eora soon followed: they were disconcerted by the suspicion these visitors were ghosts, whose sex was unknown, until the delight of recognition ensued when one sailor dropped his pants to clarify their perplexity. There were 17 encounters in the first month, as the Eora sought to defend their territorial and fishing rights. Misunderstandings were frequent: Governor Phillip mistook scarring on women's temples as proof of men's mistreatment, when it was a trace of mourning practices. From the outset, the colonizers kidnapped Eora to train them to be intermediaries between the settlers and the indigenous people. The first man to suffer this fate was the Guringai Arabanoo, who died soon after in the smallpox epidemic of 1789. Several months later, Bennelong and Colebee were captured for a similar purpose. The latter escaped while Bennelong stayed for some months, learning more about the British food needs, etiquette, weaponry and hierarchy than anything they garnered from conversing with him. Eventually Phillip built a brick house for the former at the site of the present Sydney Opera House at Tubowgulle, (Bennelong Point). The hut was demolished five years later. When the First Fleet of 1,300 convicts, guards, and administrators arrived in January 1788, the Eora numbered about 1,500. By early 1789 frequent remarks were made of great numbers of decomposed bodies of Eora natives which settlers and sailors came across on beaches, in coves and in the bays. Canoes, commonly seen being paddled around the harbor of Port Jackson, had disappeared. The Sydney natives called the disease that was wiping them out (gai-galla) and what was diagnosed as a smallpox epidemic in April 1789 effectively decimated the Port Jackson tribes. Robert King states