Guraban

AN ESSAY BY DR. SHANE INGREY AND DR. PAUL IRISH

The whole tribe rushed to a cave they knew of. It was formed by the rolling, some long years before, of three huge boulders against one another in such a way that an entrance was left, and inside was room for several hundred people…In a lull in the downpour something happened. Flame and sound came at the same second. The clustering boulders were struck. A gum was splintered and shattered, and the whole earth, it seemed to the frightened tribe, was smitten, and it groaned and was hurled into space. The great masses of rock shifted, and the entrance was closed. Utter darkness fell in there. It was a thing that had never happened to their world before.

This is part of a Dreaming story that has been passed down from our old people. It is not a story from a time gone past recorded in a colonial journal, but one that was passed down and continues to be told to the next generations of Dharawal descendants. It is about the creation of the gymea lily and relates to the Georges River and it was recorded in the 1920s by senior Dharawal woman Ellen Anderson while she was living along the river at Salt Pan Creek.1

Most of us are familiar with the Georges River as a wide salty waterway winding its way east from Liverpool to Gamay (Botany Bay). But in fact, more than half of the river is freshwater, extending about forty kilometres south from Liverpool to its headwaters in the rocky gullies around Appin. All of this is Dharawal Country and Aboriginal people have lived along the river long before it took the form we know today.

About 20,000 years ago sea levels were about 125 metres lower than the present day. Today’s wide Georges River did not exist – it was a freshwater stream flowing through the bottom of a wooded gully (like you see today from lookouts in the Blue Mountains). Where it now enters Gamay, it instead met the freshwater Cooks River and ran behind present day Towra, between Cronulla and Boat Harbour and out to the old shoreline approximately 15 kilometres to the east. Neither the Kurnell Peninsula nor Gamay existed at this time. Sea levels rose and by about 6,000 years ago the sandy plain of Gamay and the woody river gully were flooded into their current form. Aboriginal people witnessed the river form as the tidal, salty divide slowly travelled west with the rising seas, before stopping around Liverpool.

The Georges River has always been an important place to Dharawal people, and to other Aboriginal people who have used parts of the river in the past and through to the present. It has been a place that provided food, shelter and culturally significant places, not only in the past but a place that allows continual connection and usage by Aboriginal people today. There are many hundreds of recorded Aboriginal sites along the Georges River itself, and many more associated in the wider cultural landscape of its creeks, slopes and ridges. They include middens and other campsites in the open, sandstone rockshelters that were lived in and sometimes have art on their walls, rock engravings, water holes and grooves formed from the sharpening of stone axes. Sadly, many have been destroyed either through urbanisation or early “scientific collecting”, but some of these precious places still remain and need protection.

There is a misunderstanding that traditional lifestyle is a thing of the past and stopped a few years after the arrival of the British; that all of the Sydney Aboriginal people had died out due to smallpox and the colonial violence of those earliest years, leaving only archaeological finds behind. However even the archaeological record shows that this is not accurate. A famous example is Bull Cave, located in Campbelltown about a kilometre west of the river. This is a sandstone rockshelter containing cultural art depictions of animals and other cultural entities done with red ochre and charcoal outlines. The shelter also contains the charcoal outlines of several bulls that are believed to be those that escaped from the Sydney colony in 1788 and made their way south-west.2 Also included in this exhibition are some of the finds from an archaeological dig by J.V.S. Megaw and J. Wade at Connell’s Point in 1965 which included shellfish, stone tools and even bone points made from bird bone.3 Also found within this dig was a butchered sheep skull, showing the adoption of introduced foods by Aboriginal people.

These two examples among many show that Sydney Aboriginal people had not died out and continued to live along the Georges River and elsewhere after the arrival of the British, modifying their traditional lifestyles within their cultural areas and the ever-expanding colonial setting. The historical record carries this story forward from those early years, supporting the deep and continuous connections that Dharawal people have always asserted to the river.

In the early 1800s, botanist and explorer Robert Brown recorded and spoke to Aboriginal people at the junction of the Georges River and Guragurang also known as Mill Creek that led to several recordings of language and knowledge about the Georges River.4 Fifty years later, Dharawal woman Biddy Giles and her companion Billy Giles lived on a farm on Guragurang, conducting hunting and fishing tours along the Georges River and into the Royal National Park. She expertly navigated her country with ease, knew all about the plants, their uses and the Dharawal language names, was an expert fisher and had knowledge about the famous rock engravings at Jibbon Head.

Her expert knowledge and movement around the Georges River and Gamay showed her continual familiarity with her country and was commented on regularly by her tour clients. 5

In 1870 a newspaper article about the river noted that there were still ‘many half-castes who preserve much of the aboriginal type, and who, although they have been changed in character and habits by European contact, still retain a strong preference for the district in which they were born.’6 Among them were Johnny and Lizzie Malone, who provided examples of Dharawal language to anthropologists which have been used in recent decades by Dharawal descendants in Dharawal language revitalisation. The Malones and other local Aboriginal families associated with the Georges River like the Lowndes and Fussells established a camp at Sans Souci in this period.7 They received rations throughout the 1880s before eventually this and many other “black camps” around coastal Sydney were disbanded as Aboriginal people moved to the La Perouse Aboriginal settlement.

But moving away did not mean forgetting. In a news article from the Evening News in November 1900, Lizzie Malone tells the reporter that her people used to ‘be ‘all up atween here and the head of the George’s River’.8 Nor did Aboriginal people leave the river permanently. The 1920s saw many Georges River Aboriginal people and descendants return to Salt Pan Creek after their forced removal to missions all over the country.

One notable identity at Salt Pan Creek was Ellen Anderson, daughter of Biddy Giles, who purchased land at Salt Pan in the 1920s, and was later joined next door by Dharawal man William Rowley and his family, as a safe haven in a period of brutal government intervention and segregation. Ellen continued to live a semi-traditional lifestyle and the Gymea lily story we began with was among many she shared at this time, demonstrating the continuity of cultural knowledge among Dharawal people.9 Like her mother before her she had a deep knowledge of plants, in particular wildflowers, and their Dharawal names. She used this knowledge of plants and country to find the seasonal wild flowers, sell them door to door or at the local and city markets, to generate an income in a time that was hard for most Aboriginal people economically.10 During these trips, Ellen would teach her granddaughter about the plants and their medicinal and food value, the landscape on which the plants grew and the different seasonal flower blooms. She continued to teach her grandchildren using her cultural knowledge of plants and country for her to also survive economically in an ever-changing living experience.11

Today, many Dharawal descendants are continuing to learn and teach their culture as it has been passed down through time. Descendants of Ellen Anderson, William Rowley, Johnny Malone and others still learn and teach the cultural use of plants through, weaving, and artefact education, medicinal plant research, caring for Country as a part of the Gamay Rangers team out of La Perouse, teaching Dharawal language and culture and even working collaboratively on this Guraban exhibition.

This demonstrates the continuous connection Aboriginal people have to the Georges River. The continual passing down of knowledge of Georges River country. The continual care and use of the Georges River. The place where freshwater meets saltwater. Guraban.

Dr. Shane Ingrey

Dharawal descendant

Gujaga Foundation and Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage

Dr. Paul Irish

Historian Coast History and Heritage

1 Anderson, E., Australian Legends, n.p.

2 Attenbrow, V., Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, p. 150

3 Wade, J.P., ‘The Excavation of a Rock-Shelter at Connel’s [sic] Point, New South Wales’, p. 35

4 Goodall, H. and Cadzow, A., Rivers and Resilience, p. 38

5 Goodall, H. and Cadzow, A ., ibid., pp. 94-97

6 Unknown Author, ‘The Laperouse Blacks’, p. 2

7 Irish. P., Hidden in Plain View, p. 122

8 Unknown Author, ‘The Laperouse Blacks.’, p. 2

9 Anderson, E., Australian Legends, n.p.

10 Goodall, H. and Cadzow, A., ibid., p. 121

11 Goodall, H. and Cadzow, A., ibid., p. 132

References

Anderson, E., Australian Legends: Tales Handed Down from the Remotest Times by the Autochthonous Inhabitants of Our Land, Parts 1 and 2, c ompiled by C. W. Peck, Stafford & Co., Sydney, 1925

Attenbrow, V., Sydney’s Aboriginal Past: Investigating the Archaeological and Historical Records, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2010

Unknown Author, ‘George’s River’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 August 1870, p. 2

Goodall, H. and Cadzow, A., Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal people on Sydney’s Georges River, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009

Irish. P., Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal people of Coastal Sydney, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2017

Unknown Author, ‘The Laperouse Blacks.’, Evening News Sydney, 14 November 1900, p. 2

Wade, J.P., ‘The Excavation of a Rock-Shelter at Connel’s [sic] Point, New South Wales’, in Archaeology & Physical Anthropology in Oceania 2, no. 1, Oceania Publications, University of Sydney, 1967, pp. 35-40