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Session UH1: Re-exploring urban histories

1. Peter Read: The material evidence of our sorrow

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Abstract

Mulgoa was a church-owned property, in western Sydney, used as emergency accommodation for Aboriginal children evacuated from the Northern Territory in 1942. Walking round the almost forgotten site recently, Professor Gordon Briscoe reflected, 'As you drive along the road between Blacktown and Mulgoa you'll see our past has been obliterated. When we try to reconstruct it, we are accused of reconstructing a fallacy. When the white people left they sometimes they implemented a scorched earth policy. Our past is gone. We can't claim the area as part of our home, and we can't convince our own people of our history, living in NSW under the Welfare Board. The place, the material evidence that we can talk about as part of our healing, the evidence of our sorrow. Aborigines are grappling for a past that has been thrown asunder.'

Researching the history of Aboriginal Sydney, in the last year I have returned to many almost forgotten sites where Aboriginal social and political life once flourished, In this talk I will outline the kinds of material evidence which has survived, sometimes by accident, sometimes despite efforts to erase it. I will ask why this evidence has sometimes been destroyed, and more broadly, why pre-1770 Sydney rock art sites are so familiar to aficionados, but, why, conversely, the Sydney Aboriginal past since 1770 remains very largely unknown.

2. A. Burgess & D. Smith: Aboriginal stories of Victoria Park Design and Research Project

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 521KB

Abstract

This presentation introduces the Victoria Park Design and Aboriginal Histories Research Project, Sydney, an outcome of a collaborative design project between Eora Tafe design students and University of Sydney architecture students. Aboriginal histories of Victoria Park began before time was written, before the British landed and claimed it as their own. New histories have continued to be laid over this place, but they remain unseen by those who are not a part of that history. This design and research project will uncover hidden Aboriginal histories of Victoria Park, Camperdown, N.S.W., and introduce ways those stories can be reinterpreted to reveal Aboriginal place, belonging and identity in the city through an interconnected cultural journey for locals and visitors of all backgrounds. The new proposal will employ Aboriginal people to design, create, maintain and care for the installations, to continue traditional cultural values fostering cultural pride and identity, and to educate the wider community.

Aboriginal people have, and continue to live in diverse physical and social environments across the continent. What is presently called Victoria Park in Sydney is one such special place, an area where Aboriginal people have been persistently visible and present and yet consistently invisible. Though our histories of contact and resultant reactions have many common points, our forms of artistic expression vary in style, medium and story. Most probably the relationship with the land is from three levels of experience and perspectives; the 'dreaming', the colonial historical, and the personal.
Djon Mundine, OAM, Editorial, “Logs in the Park Report”,
Victoria Park Design Project, Sydney. 2009.

Background: In 2007-2008 Colin James AM, a senior lecturer from the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, won a City of Sydney Local Action Plans Matching Grant to support a series of workshops to design art installations in Victoria Park. Camperdown, a collaboration between Eora Tafe design students and students from the University of Sydney Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. Victoria Park adjoins and belongs to the University of Sydney, yet it is a public park designed in a romantic English fashion. The students were encouraged to design and decorate interesting and provocative works for park siting, subject to council approval. The Victoria Park Design and Aboriginal Histories Research Project attempts to research, reveal, write and interpret, through cultural knowledge and design, the parks unwritten Aboriginal histories.

Author bios

Anne Burgess is a Master of Philosophy candidate at the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from UTS, and a Bachelor of Architecture with first class honours from the University of New South Wales. Annie has practiced in architecture, heritage conservation, medium density housing, urban design, community and public facility planning, landscape design, and field research. She has tutored and lectured architecture students at the University of Sydney and is actively involved in the RAIA Built Environment Education Program (BEE) in Primary and High Schools. Annie is currently undertaking research at the University of Sydney Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning focussed on the contextual impact of colonisation on architectural education and practice, and the consultation process of architects working on Aboriginal projects. This research centres on the ’ Aboriginal Stories of Victoria Park Research and Design Project’ in Camperdown, Sydney, NSW.

Dorsey Smith: I am of the Dhunghutti and the Gumbangerri Nations. As a child, my grandfather and other Dhunghutti Elders taught me the Corroborree, and how to make spears, boomerangs and shields to keep our culture alive. We formed an Aboriginal Dance Group called the Dhunghutti Traditional Dancers celebrating our culture and survival.  My art works have been published in the Summer 2003, 2004 and 2005 editions of the TAFE Magazine Guwaynii. My art works have been frequently exhibited. In 2005, I received the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student of the Year Award for the Sydney Institute of TAFE and the TAFE NSW Aboriginal Gili Achievement Award. I have received Certificates II, III and IV in Aboriginal Arts and Cultural Practices at EORA TAFE College. I am now in my 4th  year Honours of the Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. In my research and artwork, I wish to promote my culture and transport it into the contemporary, starting with stories collected from my family and elders, with traditional materials from my traditional lands, using various contemporary mediums.

3. Paul Irish: Hidden in plain view – Aboriginal historical people and places in an urban Sydney landscape

Full paper | Audio | Video | Slideshow pdf 1MB

Abstract

A range of researchers over the years have turned their attention to historical and archaeological aspects of post-European contact Aboriginal life in the Sydney region. However these studies have generally been concerned either with one aspect of this life (e.g. post-contact rock art) or are very general in nature. The Sydney Aboriginal Historical Places Project builds on past work, including a more comprehensive archival survey undertaken recently by the NSW Department of Environment & Climate Change’s “Living Places Project” but with broader aims. Over the past three years this project has compiled a detailed database of over 250 places in the Sydney region at which physical traces of Aboriginal historical use are likely to have been generated, including camping places, work places, art sites, reserves and missions (though generally excluding burials). A major aim of the project is to locate these places as accurately as possible, including those at which physical evidence remains to ensure their protection under state legislation and provide irrefutable proof of the continued use of the Sydney region by Aboriginal people after 1788. However a range of other more social and cultural issues are also being investigated. For example, the research has the capacity to shed considerable light on both traditional Aboriginal life in the area (as can be implied from post-contact physical remains and historical sources) as well as the varying ways in which this life was affected by the growing presence of Europeans over time. Interestingly the comparatively high density of non-Aboriginal people in the Sydney region, although increasing the impacts to Aboriginal life and culture, also resulted in a far greater amount of historical recording about Aboriginal people and the places they frequented than many other regions in the country. It is therefore possible to trace individual or group movements across the landscape in the historical period, including in some cases their continuing use of rock art and ceremony and a range of peaceful and mutual relationships with early Europeans, creating a much more nuanced picture of post-contact Aboriginal life in the Sydney region than has previously been documented. Other questions also arise, such as why some areas appear to have little or no Aboriginal presence after 1788 and conversely, how a range of other places appear to be interrelated. The project now aims to further this research at a local scale with Aboriginal communities in the Sydney region, involving more intense archival research and ultimately archaeological survey. The project will include a training component for Aboriginal participants and seek to harness the goodwill, knowledge and skills of other local community researchers. As well as providing an overview of the project, this paper will focus on what has been learnt about how Aboriginal people continued to live within and move through an increasingly constrained landscape and retain a separate identity as well as functioning within a broader society. It will also discuss how further research could result in reconnections of Aboriginal people with places currently known only from vague historical references.

Author bio

Paul Irish has worked as a consultant archaeologist based in Sydney over the last 10 years. In addition to archaeological work, he has run an Aboriginal historical research program at Sydney Olympic Park and worked with an elder of the Napranum Aboriginal community in far north Queensland to document her life and the culture and history of her people. He has a deep interest in Aboriginal history, particularly of the Sydney region, and this has in recent years combined with his archaeological background to guide the research presented at the conference.