Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney - Softcover

Irish, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1742235115 ISBN 13: 9781742235110

Publisher: NewSouth Publishing, 2017

Synopsis

Contrary to what you may think, local Aboriginal people did not lose their culture and die out within decades of Governor Phillip’s arrival in Sydney in 1788.

Aboriginal people are prominent in accounts of early colonial Sydney, yet we seem to skip a century as they disappear from the historical record, re-emerging early in the twentieth century. What happened to Sydney’s indigenous people between the devastating impact of white settlement and increased government intervention a century later?

Hidden in Plain View shows that Aboriginal people did not disappear. They may have been ignored in colonial narratives but maintained a strong bond with the coast and its resources and tried to live on their own terms.

This original and important book tells this powerful story through individuals, and brings a poorly understood period of Sydney’s shared history back into view. Its readers will never look at Sydney in the same way.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Irish is an archaeologist and historian who has spent the past fifteen years working with local Aboriginal people on projects about Sydney’s Aboriginal archaeology and history. He has worked on the presentation of Aboriginal history at Sydney Living Museums, and has also contributed to the Dictionary of Sydney and the City of Sydney Barani website. He regularly lectures on Aboriginal history and archaeology at the University of New South Wales and Sydney University and has given many public lectures and talks.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hidden in Plain View

The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney

By Paul Irish

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Paul Irish
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74223-511-0

Contents

Maps, 
Foreword by Stan Grant, 
Acknowledgments, 
INTRODUCTION A gap in place and time, 
CHAPTER 1 Surviving the early colony (1788–1820s), 
CHAPTER 2 Living to fish (1830s–1840s), 
CHAPTER 3 Cross-cultural relationships (1790s–1840s), 
CHAPTER 4 Entangled lives (1850s–1870s), 
CHAPTER 5 Strangers in their own land (1850s–1870s), 
CHAPTER 6 Intervention (1870s–1880s), 
CHAPTER 7 New links and old ways (1890s–1930s), 
EPILOGUE In plain view, 
Further reading, 
Image references, 
Abbreviations, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Surviving the early colony (1788–1820s)

Timing is everything. When Lieutenant Cook sailed into Botany Bay in 1770, followed eighteen years later by Governor Phillip and the First Fleet, they gave the rest of the world its first glimpses of Sydney's Aboriginal people. They described and drew settlements of bark huts with oysters cooking on fires at their entrance; women fishing with hook and line in bark canoes; men poised on the rocky shore with pronged fishing spears. Though they had never seen Aboriginal people before, they were certain of two things: that the history of human life on earth was only short – perhaps a few thousand years, and that the Aboriginal way of life had not changed over that time.

They were wrong on both counts. Had they arrived ten thousand years earlier, they could not have sailed into Botany Bay – it did not yet exist. But they would still have encountered Aboriginal people, who had already been living in the Sydney region for many thousands of years. Had the First Fleet arrived just two thousand years ago, we would have none of their many illustrations of Aboriginal women fishing with burra (shell fish hooks) and line from flotillas of bark nowie (canoes). Burra had not been invented, and all of the social and economic changes that came with the rise of women's line fishing were yet to unfold.

Why is this important? Because these early historical snapshots of Aboriginal life are often regarded as depictions of real or authentic Aboriginal culture, timeless and unchanging, before it was shattered by the destructive impacts of colonialism. The idea of Aboriginal people as the world's oldest continuous culture is routinely misunderstood to mean that this way of life has never changed, and cannot change. This makes it very hard to understand how the Aboriginal hunters and fishers of coastal Sydney in the late 18th century became the mission dwellers of the late 19th, and the civil rights campaigners of the early 20th, all the while retaining a distinct Aboriginal identity. At the heart of the Aboriginal response to colonialism was a long-honed ability to adapt to change, but it has been hard to recognise with these assumptions clouding our vision. So before we see what happened to Aboriginal people in Sydney after 1788, let's turn back the clock a little further and see how Aboriginal people dealt with change before then.

A culture of change and connection

Traditional Aboriginal life is often imagined as a repeating cycle of movement, food gathering and ceremony around defined 'territories' in the landscape. Whatever kernel of reality this captures, it obscures the environmental and technological changes experienced by Aboriginal people over vast periods of time, and it ignores their complex, widespread and ever-shifting webs of connection that pushed far beyond tribal lands. It also hides the fact that Aboriginal people experienced the dramas of daily life and were players in events now long forgotten that had great importance at the time. In other words, like people everywhere, they too had history.

Aboriginal people have lived in the Sydney region for more than one thousand generations, and have witnessed the formation of the landscape Sydneysiders know today. Twenty thousand years ago, the world was in the midst of a glacial period or ice age. Though there was no ice in the Sydney region (or across most of Australia), the climate was cooler and drier, and sea levels were much lower. Today's great inlets of Sydney Harbour, Broken Bay and Port Hacking were rivers winding through deep sandstone valleys and across a vast coastal plain between six and twenty kilometres further east of the current shoreline. Botany Bay was no bay at all, but consisted of a swampy sand plain where the Cooks and Georges Rivers met, before flowing through what is now the Kurnell Peninsula. From around eighteen thousand years ago, warming global temperatures caused the sea to rise rapidly. For nearly ten thousand years it devoured the coastal plain at an average rate of two metres per year. Aboriginal people perceived this change, and though we can only guess what they made of it, the social impacts must have been profound. The flooding of the coastal plain probably forced some groups to realign or amalgamate. For hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people along the coast, constant environmental change was normal; the ground literally shifted beneath their feet.

The changing climate and landscape brought opportunity as well as challenges for Aboriginal people. By around seven thousand years ago, rising seas had flooded the sandstone river valleys and swampy sand plains of what is now coastal Sydney. Sydney Harbour, Broken Bay and Port Hacking were created, while vast quantities of sand accumulated on the new shoreline to form the Kurnell Peninsula, giving birth to Botany Bay. Many hundreds of kilometres of new coastline provided greater access to rich marine resources. Warmer sea temperatures brought creatures most likely never seen by Sydney's Aboriginal people before. The butchered remains of a six-thousand-year-old dugong found near Botany Bay show that Aboriginal people quickly learnt to exploit them. Likewise, the arrival of the dingo into Australia from south-east Asia around three thousand years ago gave Aboriginal people both a source of food and a valuable companion animal.

Until the past few thousand years, sea levels continued to fluc-tuate slightly, moving the shoreline to and fro. Large wetland com-plexes such as Towra Point and Quibray Bay on the southern shore of Botany Bay formed in the past thousand years or so, after sea levels had stabilised. The apparently timeless land that Cook and Phillip encountered as they sailed through the heads of Botany Bay in the late 18th century had only existed for a fraction of the period in which Aboriginal people had occupied Sydney. While Europeans were oblivious to these developments, Aboriginal people had always lived with change in coastal Sydney. They had forged their intimate familiarity and deep connection with its lands and waters through their accumulated ancestral experience of the diverse and shifting moods of their surroundings.

They met the challenges of a changing environment by devel-oping or adopting new technologies. Most evidence of this comes from stone implements, because those made of organic materials like bark, wood, bone and shell do not normally survive for great lengths of time buried in the soil. Even using this small sample of the Aboriginal toolkit, archaeologists have shown that many elements of the supposedly timeless way of life encountered by early Europeans in Sydney are in fact relatively recent. Until around four thousand years ago, for example, Sydney's Aboriginal people did not have the mogo (ground-stone hatchet). This meant that they could not cut toe-holds in trees and race up them to catch possums or gather native honey, as impressed Europeans noted in the late 18th century. Without a mogo to help remove large slabs of tree bark, it is also possible that the type of bark nowie which dotted Sydney waterways in the late 19th century were not being made at that time.

The mogo was just one of many stone implements that found their way into the coastal toolkit over the past five thousand years. Others included a range of cutting, incising and drilling implements and woodworking tools that continually changed the ways Aboriginal people carried out their subsistence activities (see Figure 1.1). Over the past three thousand years Aboriginal people began to use animal and fish bone to fashion deadly barbs for their garrara (fishing spears) as well as needles and awls to make and decorate skin cloaks. They also began to use tools made of shell, most notably the burra from around a thousand years ago.

Inventing and adopting these new technologies influenced the way Aboriginal people lived. As vast middens and engraved fish motifs near waterways remind us, coastal Sydney people revolved their lives around the sea and its resources, so the introduction of burra around one thousand years ago was a major innovation. They were primarily used by women, who fixed them to lines of twine and cast them from their bark nowie, giving them greater self-sufficiency. Burra also influenced daily life and cultural practices. They began to be used as personal adornments, along with other shells and fish jaws, while the ceremonial practice of malgun, in which a ligature was used to remove two joints of young girls' left little finger, was said to better allow fishing line to be wound around the hand. All of these practices, eagerly recorded by early Europeans as timeless tradition, flowed instead from Aboriginal people incorporating new technologies into their way of life. Their subsequent adoption of metal axes, metal fish hooks and other European technologies had a long pedigree, and did not signify the end of their Aboriginal identity.

Technology influenced the way coastal Sydney people interacted with other Aboriginal groups. Because the coast lacks most of the stone types needed to make hatchets, points and chisels, Aboriginal people had to develop extensive trade networks to source tools or the raw materials to make their own. Hatchets were obtained from up to several hundred kilometres away, while cobbles for flaking stone were sourced from inland Sydney and the Illawarra. The discovery that a bark shield collected by Cook from Botany Bay in 1770 was made of mangrove wood growing along the coast at least five hundred kilometres north of Sydney demonstrates that even more distant trade connections existed. When different Aboriginal groups met to trade, the transactions were not just technological. Knowledge also flowed to and fro along these networks, as well as ceremony and marriage partners. So when technologies changed, many other things changed along with them.

In Sydney, a major social shift occurred around fifteen hundred years ago. Aboriginal people from the coast began to make most of their implements from locally available materials, changing from inland Sydney river cobbles to locally available quartz for their flaked stone implements, and making tools of bone and shell. Whether this caused, or was caused by, changing social organisation or the closure of trade networks is not clear, but there was a marked decrease in interaction between the two areas from that time on. By the time Europeans arrived, coastal Sydney people drew a clear distinction between themselves and inland Aboriginal groups, and oriented their relationships along the coast to the north and south of Sydney.

These observations from the archaeological past alert us to the fact that Sydney's Aboriginal people related to places and to each other in more complex and dynamic ways than early European descriptions suggest. The First Fleet naval officers who wrote most of these accounts had stowed some powerful assumptions on their tall ships from past experiences elsewhere in the colonial world. When Aboriginal people (mostly men) in Sydney described belonging to particular clans with defined estates, this chimed with what the Europeans had observed of the tribal territories of Native American groups, and some even referred to Aboriginal people as 'Indians'. They assumed that Aboriginal people lived their lives primarily within their clan estates and, combined with a belief that this way of life was unchanging, these early accounts created a misleading but enduring picture of timeless territorial identity.

The reality was very different. Like other groups across Australia, the relationships between Sydney's Aboriginal people and land gave them both stability and mobility. They related most directly to land through their clans, whose members shared totems and descent from a common ancestor, and retained primary rights to their clan estates. Across the Sydney region in 1788 there were at least two dozen clans, each containing perhaps twenty-five to sixty people, ancestrally related through their fathers. Clans were named after their estate, such that Cadi along the southern side of the harbour was the estate of the Cadigal,Gwea south of Botany Bay was that of the Gweagal, and so on. But these clans did not live in isolation. They inter-married; the children of these relationships gained connections to two different clan estates, and perhaps to even more areas through their grandparents and other extended family. These inherited rights and responsibilities varied in strength according to the directness of each person's ancestral connection. They existed in a hierarchy that had to be constantly negotiated as senior people died, or as different groups were united by marriage. The result was that at any one time, there were a number of Aboriginal people from a range of clan groups who held connections and ceremonial obligations to particular areas, including people who lived some distance away.

Adding further dynamism to these relationships was the fact that Aboriginal people lived on a daily basis in groups known as bands, which were made up of the male members of a clan, their wives (married in from other clans) and children, and unmarried female clan members. As such, they were multilingual groups comprising members of different clans, giving them connections and rights to much broader areas than single-clan estates. We do not know the names of the land-using bands in Sydney, if indeed they had names, but they contained up to fifty people, and fragmented at times into smaller nuclear family groups.

The lives of Aboriginal people were very different from the cycle of movement around relatively small clan estates that early European descriptions conjure up. Throughout their lives, individuals retained primary rights and links to their clan estate, but also held secondary rights to other areas inherited from parents and grandparents, enacted through marriage, or because life events such as birth, conception, or death (of parents and grandparents) had occurred there. They travelled across clan estates in their bands on the basis of these rights and responsibilities, which were continually changing in prominence with the birth or death of others with greater rights. It created complex and shifting webs of connection to land and other people that linked bands across and beyond coastal Sydney.

The enduring perception of timeless territoriality has imagined Aboriginal culture as a sheet of glass, strong and cohesive in isolation but highly vulnerable to the hammer blow of colonial impact. The reality could not be more different. The intimate Aboriginal familiarity with land was hard won by living through shifting seasons, droughts, floods and longer-term environmental changes, and finding new opportunities. Connections to land were inherited through clan ancestors, but individuals also retained varying rights of access to areas far more distant through their extended family affiliations. Regular movement and shifting webs of connection may appear incompatible with a strong culture, but as historian Grace Karskens has neatly expressed, they operated around a 'stable core, a sense of rightness in one's skin'. No amount of past exposure to change could inoculate the people of coastal Sydney from the ravages of introduced disease they were to face, but the Aboriginal logic of connection through movement shaped the way that the survivors regrouped in its aftermath.

Devastation

There may have been as many as fifteen hundred Aboriginal people living in coastal Sydney in January 1788 when the ships of the First Fleet disgorged a similar number of Europeans onto the shores of Sydney Cove, known to Aboriginal people at the time as Warrane. The new arrivals quickly realised that they were strangers in someone else's land. They were tentative and restricted in their movements, venturing out in armed parties beyond their tent town in the Tank Stream valley to explore, to search for food and resources around the harbour, or to tend their crops at nearby Farm Cove. Their forays brought about conflicts with Aboriginal people; some caused unwit-tingly by unsanctioned use of Aboriginal resources; others caused by open acts of violence towards, and theft from, Aboriginal people. In that first year, Europeans became increasingly desperate to understand the Aboriginal people who dominated the landscape but shunned their fledgling settlement. By the end of 1788, they resorted to kidnapping local man Arabanoo from the beach at Manly Cove in a desperate but misguided attempt to establish contact with Sydney's Aboriginal people.

Five months later Arabanoo was dead, one of the many victims of the smallpox epidemic that raged among the Aboriginal people of the harbour. First Fleet officer David Collins recorded Aboriginal bodies strewn and abandoned around the harbour 'as if, flying from the contagion, they had left the dead to bury the dead'. Those who fled from the devastation spread the disease further, as Europeans realised years later when they saw signs of smallpox far beyond this area. Another local man, Bennelong (c.1764–1813), who was kidnapped a few months later and went on to become the colony's key Aboriginal informant, told them more about the impact of the epidemic. Though mortality rates probably varied markedly across the Sydney region, Bennelong estimated that smallpox had claimed the lives of 'one-half of those who inhabit this part of the country'. Never again did the Aboriginal population of coastal Sydney come close to the number of Europeans.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hidden in Plain View by Paul Irish. Copyright © 2017 Paul Irish. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Edition details

• Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1742235115
• ISBN 13: 9781742235110
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240