Sustainable Use of 10 Terminal Buildings on Middle Head

 

According to information presented by Baker & McKenzie’s specialist, Ilona Millar, at the Save Middle Head community meeting on Thursday 20-feb-2014 at Mosman Senior Citizens Centre, the wheels under the proposal for a commercial aged care centre in the former 10 Terminal army base could probably fall off quickly under legal challenge, should the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust be unwise to proceed with it, since it is clearly in contravention to their Act.

It is now time to start considering appropriate re-uses for 10 Terminal, that respect the heritage value of the brick buildings that form this complex, that allow complete free movement of members of the public through all the open spaces between the separate buildings, that will allow the re-establishment of natural vegetation for an appropriate landscape on Middle Head, when seen close up, from a passing ferry or recreation vessel, or from Dobroyd Head, North Head or South Head.

Middle Head dominated the entrance to Port Jackson when the First Fleet arrived on 26-jan-1788.  It is an important piece of national heritage, that should not be spoiled by poor quality new buildings that breach the Trust Act applying to Middle Head.  The First Australians in the northern Sydney region knew Middle Head as Cubba Cubba.  It has important natural values that could be leveraged with a new approach to tourism for both interstate and overseas visitors – natural bushland just 20 minutes by ferry from Circular Quay, fabulous bird life, still populated with native fauna, and located convenient to Taronga Zoo, for tourists who like to pack a lot into each of their few days in Sydney.

The community also needs to consider the historic significance of this site – as country for the Gamaragal people in 1788, and as the first military base on the Australian coast, dating from 1801.  In 1815 Governor Lachlan Macquarie set up about 70 Indigenous people led by Bungaree, mainly from Broken Bay after the small pox wiped 90% of the original occupants within 3 years, according to some historians.  Macquarie wanted to remove the Indigenous people from the growing dangers of European settlement around Sydney Cove.  He hoped to turn them into farmers and fisher men on Middle Head with a grant of land, equipment, a boat for fishing, whose excess food could be sold back in the British settlement.  Bungaree’s Farm was doomed to failure from the start, because of totally unsuitable soil, poor tools and lack of any experienced farming skills in the Colony to teach them.

Side by side with the Indigenous history on Middle Head is its role in the defence of the colony against potential French and Russian invaders in the 19th century.  Less well-known were the activities on Middle Head during WW I, WW II and the Vietnam War.  There is an exciting opportunity to combine the natural values of Middle Head, with both its Indigenous and military history, to come up with a world-class centre on Middle Head.  Studies now being undertaken show that a high quality tourist facility can be self-financing, play a role in training young Indigenous people and create valuable meaningful jobs.

—
John Young

m:  0407 940 943
e:   yindi1951@gmail.com

 

Blackboy Creek – Art Works by Gordon Syron

Gordon Syron
Born 26- dec-1941

Thirty years ago, Gordon Syron painted one of his iconic works “Judgement by his peers”. It instantly struck a chord with Aboriginal audiences given their high rates of incarceration at the time. Two decades later Aboriginal people still made up 15.2% of the prison population in NSW, though they were only 2% of the general population . As Syron wrote:

“This painting is my most meaningful work. It is the story of my life. This trial happened to me. I challenged the jury system of Australia. I asked that I be judged by my peers and your peers are your equals. I asked to have some Aboriginal people on my jury. One lawyer said that I wasn’t black enough to be black, the other lawyer said I wasn’t white enough to be white. They then argued this point in front of me for sometime. Both my parents were Aboriginal. It was such an insult to me and my family. I was judged by an all-white jury. I served a life sentence.”

Before Gordon painted “Judgement by his peers”, southern Aboriginal artists working in a ‘Western’ tradition attempted to cross the cultural bridge by painting their land in realistic grand vistas, or through nature studies of birds, fish, animal or insect from their inherited religious stories. Syron’s strong contemporary Aboriginal themes pioneered a field of representation that eventually influenced artists such as Richard Bell, Adam Hill, and Gordon Hookey. Though not always transparent Syron’s purpose has always been essentially political.

During the decade following Syron’s birth in 1945, African-American writer Richard Wright published his autobiographical work ‘Black Boy’, telling his life story of over coming racism, poverty, and other hardships to educate himself and become an award-winning writer. Later, ‘The Invisible Man’ novel [1952] by African-American novelist Ralph Ellison, tells the development of an African-American man in his sense of identity and empowerment. By the novel’s end, after encounters with ‘black’ and ‘white’ institutions, industry and society; he comes to realize that he has persistently let others define his identity and limit his sense of empowerment. He has become conscious that his complex personality and history, the basis of his identity, are what disempower and limit him.

The character Red played by Morgan Freeman in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, relates:

“Rehabilitation: There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here, or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then: a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try and talk some sense to him, tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated? It’s just a bullshit word. So you go on and stamp your form, sonny, and stop wasting my time. Because to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit.”

This sense of loss and disengagement from the wider community resonated strongly through Syron and his work. He has painted for more than 30 years, yet eschewed the gallery system. He has presented himself and his ideas solely within the Aboriginal community. In this regard this exhibition at Coo-ee Gallery is an escape from his disengagement and invisibility.

Paintings have been drawn only from his most recent works though themes have been worked and reworked since the 1980’s. His Emu series, first exhibited in the Apmira exhibition at Paddington town Hall, Sydney, in the early 1980s, schizophrenically alludes to a hunted fugitive stalked by a red-coated soldier on one hand, and the keeper of Aboriginal law; ‘the feather foot’ Kaidtja man, on the other .

His ubiquitous use of the colour blue reminds us that this colour is not recorded in any Aboriginal language. Aboriginal people clearly knew it, as it is so evident in the sky and it is the colour of sacred birds and other creatures. When questioned about this Syron comments:

When I was ‘inside’ I looked often though my cell window into the distance. When you look into the distance in the country I see blue .

Other indigenous artists drawn to the colour include Jeffrey Samuels and Bronwyn Bancroft. Bancroft described its source as that overlaying wash covering the forests of the bush, especially at twilight. This is the same sentiment seemingly expressed by painters of the Heidelberg School of the late 19th century who saw the Australian light in ʻgoldʼ and ʻblueʼ.

Syron’s paintings of the Australian bushland remind us that it’s no accident that the British named the place where they first landed ‘Botany Bay’. The land, seemingly so harsh by English perceptions, actually blossomed and glowed. As recently deceased Warburton elder Mr. Ward obsevered:

‘And the land is always humble to the tourists, to see. There are flowers blooming and the birds flying; there is water, there are places, You wouldn’t see those kinds of places in your life-time, you only see it once, it only comes up once.’

In his own western desert country near Warburton, seasons occur in a cycle that may take several years to complete.

In a skit on the ABC’s D Generation comedy program a young female kindergarten teacher sits with a chessboard with it’s black and white pieces set up to play.

‘And now children, She says, we’re going to talk about Australian history and the power game. Firstly we get rid of all the black pieces.’

Smiling, she then brushes all the black pieces off the board. At Tubugowle [Sydney Cove], on the site of the first landing and real colonization, in the heart of the present day Sydney metropolis, a Christian clergy man, a red coated soldier, and a Ned Kelly type figure, sit to play a game of chess with a powerless Aboriginal man; ‘the big game’; ‘the world game’.

Now a national figure in the arts, through his growing friends and associates, Gordon has now become a player.

 

---

Djon Mundine  OAM
Aboriginal Curator – Contemporary Art
Campbelltown Art Centre
http://www.cooeeart.com.au/aboriginal_exhibition/55/information

Under the skin of an enigmatic pioneer

Michael Fitzgerald
Ausgust 29, 2012
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/under-the-skin-of-an-enigmatic-pioneer-20120828-24ymf.html

Elusive … Mervyn Bishop’s The Showman.

It is late April and a dozen of Australia’s leading Aboriginal artists have gathered inside a former naval cottage at Georges Heights above Sydney Harbour for some brainstorming.

Master of ceremonies is indigenous curator Djon Mundine, his signature dreadlocks trailing the floor. But Mundine has a surprise in store, asking his artists to put down their usual tools and play with some theatrical props – a 19th-century cocked hat and red military jacket. Their mission is to get under the skin of one of colonial Australia’s most enigmatic figures, a Garigal man from Broken Bay who, in circumnavigating the continent with Matthew Flinders in 1802-03, was coined “the first Australian”. His name was Bungaree.

“He was the first north shore person, looking at the people on the south shore, just watching them,” Mundine says. A young man when the First Fleet arrived in 1788, Bungaree was a silent witness to the founding of a colony among the sacred trees and fishing grounds of Tubugowle or Sydney Cove. His curiosity and sense of adventure led him to join the crew of Flinders’s Investigator. A decade later, Governor Macquarie honoured him with farmland at Georges Heights and the title of “Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe”. Greeting ships that arrived in Sydney Harbour wearing his trademark cocked hat and redcoat, Bungaree became the first Aboriginal entrepreneur, immortalised by Augustus Earle’s famous 1826 portrait but shrouded in mystery following his death in 1830.

Nearly two centuries since the founding of his farm at Georges Heights, an exhibition at nearby Mosman Art Gallery seeks to uncover the man behind the myth. While Bungaree was celebrated in 18 colonial portraits, making him the most painted figure in Sydney at the time, there has been no portrayal from an indigenous perspective – until now.

“I call him a man for all seasons, a man who crossed over into different varieties of life,” says veteran photographer Mervyn Bishop, one of 15 artists invited by Mundine to respond to Bungaree’s story through contemporary eyes. In his digital photograph The Showman, Bishop depicts Bungaree as the ultimate shape-shifter, morphing from traditional hunter to mariner to farmer to colonial jester.

Other artists grapple with the elusive nature of a figure who survives mainly through third-person readings.

“Because you’re dealing with mostly historical accounts, there are elements of his character that remain quite enigmatic,” says artist Danie Mellor, who has painted Bungaree and his family dwarfed by willow pattern-style native flora and fauna – Lilliputian figures that remain uncatchable by European classification.

For Fiona Foley, Bungaree is a pioneering cultural navigator. Her text on blanket work quotes from Rolf de Heer’s 2002 film The Tracker: All men choose the path they walk.

“You can never really put your finger on the man,” she says, “but what I like about him is his spirit – that’s what I pick up from the story. What a fantastic spirit to be able to live and work and eat and travel with non-indigenous Australians around the whole coast of Australia.”

An invaluable member of the crew, Bungaree saved Flinders from the frequent threat of attack from the different Aboriginal language groups they encountered, often shedding his European clothes to show off his initiation markings, and endearing himself with his flair for fishing and hunting. “To be able to do that with a sense of diplomacy and tact was quite extraordinary,” Mellor says.

For the remainder of his life in Sydney, Bungaree created a unique role between cultures which set him apart from his contemporaries Bennelong and Pemulwuy. While the farm at Georges Heights failed for a variety of reasons (not least because Bungaree preferred fishing to farming), he was often called on by the colonial powers for his cultural diplomacy and leadership – even while gently mocking authority in his military garb.

“Bungaree clearly had his own agenda,” says biographer Keith Vincent Smith, a historical consultant for the show. “He wanted to have the best of both worlds.”

Mundine, a senior Aboriginal figure, sees Bungaree with unusual empathy and clarity, speaking of him in present tense: “He’s cheeky, he’s intelligent and certainly knows how to read white ways if not literally.”

Mundine should know. Having curated the National Gallery of Australia’s Aboriginal Memorial and the international touring show Shadowlife, he has helped steer Aboriginal art into the wider world. He insists the secret to good curating is encouraging artists “to get outside their comfort zones, to think outside the box”.

In getting under Bungaree’s skin and allowing audiences to circle Australia through indigenous eyes, he is charting new territory again.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/under-the-skin-of-an-enigmatic-pioneer-20120828-24ymf.html#ixzz2ul3tyQqr

Bungaree Revived

Jeremy Eccles
Originally published 15-aug-2012
http://news.aboriginalartdirectory.com/2012/08/bungaree-revived.php

Karla Dickens ‘The Initiated’, oil and mixed media on canvas, 102 x 76 cm – one of three carnivalesque collaged images entitled, ‘The Pirate and The King’, Of course there were no Kings in Aboriginal society, no-one could order any-one-else about.

“White Australia has a black history – white middle class Mosman has a black history. Aboriginal people are everywhere and Aboriginal people do everything. I came to work on this project to emphasise the Aboriginal history of the southeast and the fact that Aboriginal people lived all through the natural resource rich Tubugowle basin, and not just in Redfern or La Perouse.”

In a bold essay entitled (for no apparent reason) ‘Bungaree’s Circumcision of Australia’ , Indigenous curator Djon Mundine has gathered together 15 NSW Aboriginal artists to consider the lives and influence of the Guringai man who was happy to play ball with the newly arrived Colonial invader and ended up being given farmland on Middle Head (in today’s Mosman), being taken by Matthew Flinders on his pioneering circumnavigation of Australia to treat with the tribes they’d meet on the way, and was actually the first man ever to be called ‘an Australian’.

It sounds like a useful life embracing the inevitability of the new settlementt – though the farming never caught on, Bungaree being much happier rowed around by two of his wives to fish or greet ship arrivals in Port Jackson! But Mundine points out the problems for more political minds today: “Contemporary Aboriginal people struggle with our colonial period antecedents. Were they complete cowardly sell-outs to the colonial invaders (and what would we have done)? Many believe so and dismiss the need for much deeper research (see Adam Hill’s piece – illustrated – and he’s certainly not alone). Perhaps they are afraid of what they will see looking back at them. A binary of sorts has been created in some minds around Bungaree’s contemporaries Bennelong and Pemulwuy – Bennelong surrendering and being assimilated, and Pemulwuy resisting and dying in action. Ironically in fact there was only a few years of extra life between resisting and acquiescence. In taking a kind of ‘third path’ Bungaree lived longer still.

What is good or bad in Aboriginal morality? Who is to judge? My own thoughts of him were of a youthful innocent who bravely stepped forward to engage with the strangers, to travel out of sight of land, to put himself in their hands, He was to have the biggest adventure of all; of travelling around the continent and meeting Malays, meeting his kind all over the land, our land!”

The Mosman Art Gallery proposed the project – and was funded by the Federal Government to the tune of $35,000 – and has facilitated many of the artists to have residencies on Middle Head so that they could get close to their subject-matter. The artists involved are Francis Belle-Parker, Merv Bishop, Daniel Boyd, Karla Dickens, Fiona Foley, Adam Hill, Warwick Keen, Gary Lee, Danie Mellor, Peter McKenzie, Caroline Oakley, Rea, Gordon Syron, Leanne Tobin and Jason Wing.

Amazingly, there are 18 contemporary portraits of Bungaree extant – more than any other individual in early Sydney. They range from noble savage to drunkard. Now there are many more – including Merv Bishop’s mock-ups, which extend the range: Garingal Man, Sailor Man, Farmer Man, and the mimesis Fool-King.

If nothing else is achieved by this exhibition, Djon Mundine’s fascinating thoughts about certain parallels between the Enlightenment world Sydney’s colonials had left and Aboriginal systems that preceded the Enlightenment by 40,000 years, which, naturally the new arrivals totally failed to understand, are worth leaving you with:
“Around the time of the British coming here in 1788, Europe had just passed through the period called ‘the enlightenment’ – the age of reason, when man broke with God (or just as correctly saw the god within themselves). It was also the age of ‘discovery’, the age of plagues, also the age of colonization, and the new age of slavery along race lines. Part of this development was to ‘discover’, list, investigate, and therefore possess, if only mentally, each new species of man, beast, and society.

They also attempted to redraw, rename the map in their own, often accidental image. It impressed with the power and control of naming, to a large degree ignoring the idea that these societies may have already mapped the land themselves, and had their own taxonomy and methods of maintaining its memory. In Aboriginal society the world begins with the sunrise and a creative being traversing the land or sea, sighting and naming animal, plant, all living things and climatic forces, fixing them in landforms and sites. The naming animates them and brings them into being”.

One Vision for Cubba Cubba (Middle Head Mosman)

Our campaign for opposing the placing of a commercial aged care centre on Cubba Cubba(Middle Head, Mosman) in the former 10 Terminal army buildings has been built around our vision for a permanent home for the Gordon and Syron Keeping Place collection of 2000+ pieces of Indigenous art work.  Re-use of the existing buildings for this type of purpose would be 100% in line with the Sydney Harbour Federation Act 2001. A commercial aged care centre, that closes of access by the general public to significant amounts of currently open space on Middle Head is in direct conflict with the objectives of that piece of legislation.

As our tiny group communicated this concept out to a broader audience – both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians – people told us that they wanted the physical building to take on many more hopes and visions – of recognition of the Indigenous struggle since 1788, of healing, and of reconciliation.

The CEO of our campaign, Josephine Cashman, is a member of Tony Abbott’s Indigenous Advisory Council and was meeting in Canberra last week with the Prime Minister and senior members of the Coalition Government.   These meetings focused on actions needed to close the gap – in education, housing, health and employment.

The following model describes graphically how this vision could be achieved at Cubba Cubba (Middle Head, Mosman), starting off with art and culture at the centre, wrapped in a layer of recognition, healing and reconciliation.  And the efforts of many government agencies, corporate entities and volunteer community groups will deliver the programs based on education, employment, entrepreneurship, health, leadership, etc.

I am optimistic that the time is right for Australians to work together as a team, and that Cubba Cubba, in Gamaragal country, is a good place to focus some, of this energy and goodwill, to close the gap.

But we need your support to make this happen…
.

.

John Young
Director Communications
Bungaree Keeping Place 

https://bungareekeepingplace.wordpress.com/supporters

 

Why the Apology, Reconciliation, Healing and Recognition Matter

Speech by Josie Cashman
to an audience of 600, Global Enterprise, Canberra
14-feb-2014

I am humbled and proud to be asked to speak to you on the 6th anniversary of the National Apology. This year at the opening of Parliament the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Abbott acknowledged  the damage done to the Stolen Generations. The Apology, Reconciliation, Healing and Recognition are so important to enable all Australians to come together. Many leaders have outlined the effects of the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and the need for reconciliation, healing and forgiveness. In this speech, I want to use this opportunity to highlight why these things matter and what is the biggest threat to moving forward as one country.

What is the greatest challenge? My answer may surprise you! To frame this I will look back in history to 1938, to an event that was not a sad occasion for our people but a show of strength, pride and hope. I will also talk about one of my Indigenous heroes, the Phillips family of Redfern.

Firstly, I want to pay my respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and high achievers past and present. Our modern Indigenous leaders are very, very courageous. They are often attacked for having a view. Recent examples include on social media where our Australian of the Year was described as ‘Captain Coconut’, the reference to a coconut is a racial slur meaning dark on the outside and white on the inside.  And last year the Chair of the Indigenous Advisory Council was subject to a much-publicised raft of racial slurs on social media, including being called “Uncle Tom”, for his willingness to advise a Coalition government on solving the problems that face our people. This behavior should not be tolerated in any culture. Leaders suffer a personal toll with both them and sometimes their families attacked with disgraceful sniping and lateral violence at the hands of their own people. This is fuelled by the far Left for its own agenda.

These groups promote and encourage conspiracy theories that the Government and Australian people are against Aboriginal people and that we continue to be victims of this society. Under this world view, every problem faced by Indigenous people is the result of bad things done by European colonists and assimilation into western cultures. The value of so-called “western” influences to Indigenous people – like mainstream education and economic development – is questioned.

Disadvantage and suffering have become the defining characteristics of the far left. Institutionalised welfare is a key policy platform for them. Any suggestion that welfare dependence has had negative impacts on Indigenous people is not tolerated. Underpinning all of this is an idealised concept of traditional Indigenous people not “corrupted” by civilization or development. There is an old expression to describe this – the “noble savage”.

How can we build mutual respect in an environment where fear and distrust of government and the Australian people is encouraged? How can we move on to healing when there are people who want to define us as damaged? This is a cancerous philosophy.

This is the most destructive form of racism and is promoted by the far Left to feed into their ideology that western free market democracy is wrong and we have to keep Indigenous Australians as noble savages. It is this ideology that is stopping Indigenous Australians coming into the economic mainstream. Labelling Aboriginal and Torres Strait People as disadvantaged and victims sets extremely low expectations in terms of employment, business capacity and education. The welfare mentality is the greatest challenge inhibiting our people to rise up. This ideology is the height of discrimination and it is destroying our cultural values which embraced hard work, taking responsibility and contributing to community. This threat from the far Left is what I call intellectual racism.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are sick of being used as a political football for only radicals’ political and ideological purposes. Enough is enough!

This ideology is also totally disrespectful to the Indigenous leaders who had a dream for their families and communities of coming together with all Australians. We need to remember the passion and conviction of our past leaders. They were hopeful and never victims. These leaders were dignified and capable of galvanizing their community as they dreamt for a better life.

An example of this is the historic meeting of the Australian Aborigines’ League at the Day of Mourning Conference on 26 January 1938.  Over 100 people attended from all around the Eastern Seaboard. With little money travelling from far and wide, they were strongly committed and came together to fight for a better life at their own personal risk.  All were well dressed in suits and were well-spoken. Many delegates entered through the back entrance to avoid being identified, afraid they would be victimised by police for attending.

The conference endorsed the following statement:

WE, representing THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA, assembled in Conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the whitemen’s seizure of our country, HEREBY MAKE PROTEST against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years, AND WE APPEAL to the Australian Nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to FULL CITIZEN STATUS and EQUALITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY.

Many of our Aboriginal leaders today are direct descendants of this group and I am privileged to acknowledge the contributions their ancestors made.

African-American scholar and economist Dr Thomas Sowell argues that the most damaging results of the welfare state mentality, is the teaching of victimhood. If African-Americans in the 1930s and 40s had been taught that they were victims, then the Civil Rights movement may have never happened. African-Americans survived through centuries of slavery, then their society began to fall apart with the introduction of the welfare state.

In the 1990s Dr Sowell gave a lecture at a university, a young African-American man who was about to graduate, got up from the audience and said ‘What hope is there for me?’. Dr Sowell took off his glasses and said to this young man, ‘you have four-times the hope of your grandparents and twice that of your parents’. This is equally true for Indigenous families. Why then are we not advancing when we have strong political, business and community support including the National Apology and the reconciliation movement?

Like African-Americans, Indigenous Australians are marred by the disadvantage label. A label that teaches us that there is no hope, so what is the point of participation in society?

This is not a phenomena necessarily related to race. It is reflected in the UK amongst whites in the housing commission areas.  Teenagers there can’t multiply six times nine. This country produced people such as Shakespeare and Issac Newton and now a significant proportion of its society can’t do simple maths and cannot read.

In the worst affected areas of Australia, only 18% of remote and rural Indigenous kids attend school 80% of the time, and that 80% is the minimum required to attend to learn the basics. These are the alarming statistics. In 2014 despite being full citizens with equality in the community and access to education we are now faced with the lowest Indigenous school attendance rates.  Most of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders dreamt of being treated as full citizens of this country with full access to education. Here we are now. But if we allow Indigenous people to think they can’t do anything or think the system is against us, what is the point of learning? No if or buts, every Indigenous child need to attend school! One day, I dream of many Aboriginal doctors, accountants and public servants.

If we believe maybe even an Indigenous astronaut to shoot to the moon, because we now live in a world full of possibilities.

We need to get back to the basics of our culture and allow a diversity of opinions in a respectful and supportive manner. This is the vital element for reconciliation, healing and recognition to become a reality in our great country.

I am pleased to say that there are many examples of modern-day Indigenous leaders who are victorious. They do not accept the Left’s intellectual racism and the disadvantaged label. They are the Aussie battlers working hard in the community to lift their people, create hope and to let them believe that anything is possible.

An example of this is Mr Shane Phillips, a community leader in Redfern, Sydney. Shane works day and night with Aboriginal kids picking up troubled teenagers up so they can attend early morning sessions of boxing with the local police officers, which brings both groups together to promote citizenship and harmony. Shane also runs and established the Tribal Warrior Association, these wide-sailed ships, glide gracefully on our glorious Sydney Harbour, providing meaningful employment for Aboriginal people as tourist guides and ship operators. Shane engages with the Aboriginal community, promotes kids going to school and helps Aboriginal people gain self-esteem.

Shane’s parents Richard ‘Dickie’ and Yvonne Philips are also my heroes. These pastors gave endless service to the community. Every year they took in up to 200 Indigenous and non-Indigenous street children, some of whom were forced to sell their bodies to survive. They huddled on the floor in the leaky cold, old church that used to be a factory, on the ‘Block at Redfern’. Sometimes over 50 or more foam beds littered the floor. Smiling, the children lay their heads down, with full bellies entertained by Uncle Richard playing the ukulele and praising the Lord while slowly hushing them into a gentle slumber with his soft lullaby. These kids were given a safe place and hope for their future.

This couple never gave up with limited funds, if any Government funding.  They instead had a strong conviction that good would prevail. Since this time, we have as a nation benefited from the most historical events to bring us together including the apology, movement towards reconciliation, healing and recognition. I am sure Mr and Mrs Philips would be looking down on us from heaven, not only very proud of their children, but of how far all Australians have come.

I feel so privileged to have spent time with these Preachers. I will never forget when I was feeling down when dear Pastor Philips slowly turned his head around to face me, opened his soft dark eyes with the widest smile and gently said to me ‘never give up on the edge of a miracle’.

The appeal by the Australian Aborigines’ League on 26 January 1938 has in fact, been answered. Australia has made new laws for the education and care of Indigenous people, it hasraised our people to full citizen status and has introduced a policy to raise our people to equality within the community. Australia has gone even further than our leaders in 1938 would have imagined. Governments and the private sector have been willing to spend billions in pursuit of real equality for Indigenous people. A formal reconciliation process has been in place for over 20 years and governments have apologised for the policies of the forced removal of children. And now our Parliament is preparing to champion a constitutional amendment to recognise Indigenous people in Australia’s constitution. These symbolic steps demonstrate the goodwill of Australia towards its first peoples and their descendants. On the other hand the victimhood label is wrong and harmful for our futures.

It is time for each of us, black, white or brindle to seize the day and galvanize like never before to finally solve the gap. Let us now rewrite wrongs and recognize the first Australians in the best country in the world. We immediately need to support the Prime Minister’s historic push for the recognition of Indigenous peoples in the Australian constitution.  We need to walk the talk in our professional roles and communities. We need now for every Australian to participate in this, every single Australian’s effort counts.

When I was originally selected on the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council our Prime Minister, Mr Tony Abbott phoned me and I was so nervous it took me three hours to phone him back after receiving my call at 6AM. I will never forget the Prime Minister’s powerful words that are now cemented in my mind. ‘Josephine, Indigenous People are the first class citizens of their own country’.  It dawned on me then how much hope Mr Abbott has today with this historic opportunity for healing, coming together to showcase our talent and diversity in Indigenous Australia through constitutional recognition. We have a rich culture of respect and family values are the cornerstone. We need to get back to basics and that is back to the start.

Today you have an opportunity to make a real difference. You have a choice to reinstate hope in your professional capacity as an Australian Public Servant and as a member of the Australian community. You have the opportunity to bring everyone together as never before and recognize the first peoples of this beautiful country. My task for you is to function on hope.

Everyday all of us, make choices as to whether we live in hope or disadvantage. My own story shows that we have positive choices to make. From deciding to live hopeless in a drain at 12 to now today, I am standing here, my heart is so full I can’t explain. With that faith, now, maybe today, All Australians, are on the edge of a miracle.

Josephine Cashman
14-feb-2014

Keeping Place History

History of the Keeping Place

Over the past thirty years, Aboriginal artist Gordon Syron and photographer Elaine Syron have collected Aboriginal Art.

• 2002: Chika Dixon opened the museum called Black Fella’s Dreaming in 239 Oxford St. Darlinghurst. Chika Dixon became their first Patron that year and remained so, until his passing in 2010. At the official opening his grandchildren and great-grandchildren danced traditional dances on the street and into the gallery where a smoking ceremony was held.
• 2003: Elaine and Gordon started a gallery called Black Fella’s Dreaming on Oxford St in Darlinghurst, Sydney.
• 2004:  Gordon and Elaine opened the museum <where?> to the public and SBS film crew headed by Aboriginal Film-maker Adrian Wills filmed the opening.
• <what year?> A documentary film was made, called ” Bush Wedding” and it opened at the Sydney Opera House in 2006. It was later shown on SBS television.
• <what year?> Actor and Elder Noel Tovey flew from Melbourne to officially open our museum called Black Fella’s Dreaming.
•  2005: Black Fella’s Dreaming closed for lack of financial support.
• <what year?> they moved the collection to a large museum and gallery space in Bangalow in Northern NSW.
• 2007: they decided to sell the collection, so that a national Keeping Place could be set up somewhere secure and accessible to the greatest number of visitors. local and overseas, Indigenous and non-Indigenous.
• It has now been 6 years of trying to find a government body, benefactor or philanthropist to take over the collection and this has still not happened.
• Since 2007 the Keeping Place collection has been catalogued by Unilinc and valued by Adrian Newstead of Coo-ee Gallery.

John Young
Bungaree Keeping Place
11-feb-2014

Meeting Dr Keith Vincent Smith

Dr Keith Vincent Smith has been researching the history of the First Australians around the Sydney Area for many years now.  I bought his first book “King Bungaree” soon after it was published in 1992.   His writing fired up a spark of interest I had since first hearing the name of Bungaree attached to one of the two Cub Scout Packs that we had then down at 1st Balmoral Sea Scout Group.  Incidentally the other Pack was called “Sirius”, so someone had a nice sense of balance and reconciliation back in the 1980s when demand for places gave rise to the formation of the second Cub Scout Pack.

Mosman Council put a wonderful bronze bust of Bungaree outside the entrance to the Council Chambers early in the 2000s.  This prompted me to dig out Keith’s book again,  and it has been laying on my desk almost constantly ever since.

Keith has published several other books about Bungaree, Permulway and Benelong, curated numerous exhibitions about the First Australians in the Sydney region, and has become the thought leader and acknowledged go to historian for Indigenous people and culture in the Sydney region.

My current work with the Bungaree Keeping Place prompted me to track down Keith, who is quite discrete and modest about his expertise in this field.   After 2 weeks of solid searching online, and via the network of academics, local historians, exhibition directors and curators I finally located him!  Yesterday Keith invited me to meet him at his current exhibition titled Gamaragal at Manly Art Gallery, till 20-apr-2014. It was a great privilege to have Keith personally walk me around his exhibition and to hear how passionately he talks about the story he has been able to recreate from primary sources of the First Australians in the Sydney region.

 

John Young
11-feb-2014

Renaming Middle Head as Cubba Cubba

The First Australians who lived on the north side of Sydney Harbour knew Middle Head by the name of Cubba Cubba.

I think it is time to re-instate some of the geographic names used by the First Australians. Let’s start the process with Cubba Cubba, in respect to the thousands of First Australians who died in the first three years of European settlement at Sydney Cove, due to the accidental, deadly introduction of small pox.

Sources

http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/bungaree
Dr Keith Vincent Smith, 2011

Gavin Souter, A History of  Mosman, 1994

http://www.harbourtrust.gov.au/system/files/pages/030225d6-8ce5-3c24-ed86-cc4664904bbf/files/07heritageimpactstatement.pdf

http://www.harbourtrust.gov.au/system/files/pages/8f218079-46e1-0834-6185-c9fe52751d07/files/chpt-7-middlehead.pdf  refers to an alternative spelling Caba-Caba

Academics believe that ‘cubba’ was the Guringai (Kuringai) word for ‘head’.  So Cubba Cubba could mean ‘large head’ or ‘many headlands’. South of Middle Head are other major headlands which are now known as ‘Georges Head’ and Chowder Head’.

John Young
cubbacubba2015@gmail.com
8-feb-2014

Bungaree Farm @ Middle Head

Governor Lachlan Macquarie made a land grant to 60 – 100 people, originally from a tribal area around Broken Bay.  The group may have also included remnants of the ______ and ______ who previously lived in the Mosman area, but had been almost totally wiped out by the arrival of small pox.

The people who lived at Bungaree Farm were organised in 16 family units, and led by Bungaree,  who had contact experience, since about 1798, with the British colony that was rapidly growing out from Sydney Cove.

Sadly there is little unambiguous, written documentation, maps or charts about  the exact location of Bungaree Farm.  The debate still being carried on amongst Kooris and modern academics focuses on 2 major options – at Georges Head and Middle Head.

Sources

Bungaree @ Middle Head

This breastplate is believed to be the first one given to Bungaree, by Governor Lachlan Macquarie on 31st January 1815, at the same time as the granting of a land grant to Bungaree’s tribe of 100 people, of which he was the leader.

The inscription on it is extremely significant.  At this time the European settlers and convicts would have still been describing themselves as British, Irish or English.   The term Australia only started to come into play after the completion of the circumnavigation of the Australian continent on the HMS Investigator, which left Sydney on 20-jul-1802.  Matthew Flinders was the leader of this voyage, but not many Australians realise that Bungaree was chosen by Flinders to be “ambassador” with the other Indigenous peoples that they met around the coastline of Australia, but also in Timor.

HMS Investigator arrived back in Sydney Harbour in June 1803.   The historic impact of
this achievement cannot be under-estimated, for people living in Australia, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as the British Government 12,000 miles away in the northern hemisphere.

I believe it was Matthew Flinders who described Bungaree as “the first Australian” in a log entry recorded on HMS Investigator, while making their way back east from what is now called  Western Australia.

Macquarie’s experiment to establish Aboriginals on a farm, located well away from the challenges of alcohol, gambling and fighting in the fast growing convict settlement around Sydney Cove, looks like a very mis-guided and inappropriate action, with the benefit of hindsight.  But for the time it was a viewed by the emerging ruling class and free settlers are being over generous and a waste of time.

 

Source:  

http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/bungaree
Dr Keith Vincent Smith, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol34bUxm1ao&noredirect=1
Dr Keith Vincent Smith, “The Many Faces of Bungaree”, delivered at an event arranged by Mosman Council about 8-aug-2011

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Investigator_(1798)
HMS Investigator (1798)

 

 

Aboriginal Mosman

The following post is reproduced in full from the Mosman Council web site at

http://www.mosman.nsw.gov.au/mosman/history/indigenous

Anne Cook
Mosman Aboriginal Reconciliation Community Group
2000

The Mosman area with its extensive shoreline and wooded headlands is surely unique in this city. The bushland contains many species typical of the Hawkesbury sandstone heaths and woodlands of the Sydney Basin… angophoras, banksias, grass trees and acacias, for instance. Indeed from some points of view the natural environment of Mosman might seem to be just as it was in 1788 when from Cubba Cubba, now known as Middle Head, people of the Kuringgai tribe (or language group) saw the Europeans sail into the harbour for the first time.

But Mosman has not always been part of a marine environment. Nearly 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age much of the sea was frozen in polar ice caps, so that the coast was between 20 and 30 kilometres further east. At that time the headlands formed an inland range something like the Lower Blue Mountains. Aboriginal people lived here then, too.

What do we know about these clans of the Kuringgai tribe, people whose country we now enjoy in some ways very much as they did?

Traditional Aboriginal Culture

Because the Cammeraigal and Borogegal clans were quickly forced from their lands in this area soon after the arrival of the Europeans, what little we can know of them must be learned from the archaeological record and from the observations of early colonists, informed by an understanding of how Aboriginal people in other parts of the country continue to maintain aspects of traditional life today. After all, if Captain Cook had landed in Darwin the Dharawal, Dharug and Kuringgai people of Sydney Harbour might still be living a traditional life!

A thorough ground-based archaeological survey has never been attempted over the whole of Mosman but still there are 79 known sites (NPWS 1999) and archaeologists believe that many more exist, particularly along the shorelines. These sites are occupation sites, for example middens, religious or ceremonial sites and rock art sites. Many of course have been destroyed or lie under buildings, but many others are assumed by archaeologists to survive in the foreshore bushland. There is a rock shelter occupation site open to public view at the southern end of The Esplanade at Balmoral, opposite the swimming pool. The National Parks and Wildlife Service from time to time offers tours of other sites within The Sydney Harbour National Park.

A lot of items that were in everyday use have not survived, being of organic material, but these would have included canoes, spears, dishes, baskets, cloaks and childrens’ toys, fishing nets and lines. The early settlers saw the people fishing but they were mistaken in thinking that therefore the Aboriginal people depended solely on the fruits of the sea for their existence. There were edible plants on the heaths and in the woodlands behind the shoreline. The flowers of the banksia, for instance, were steeped in water to make a sweet refreshing drink; the fruit of the macrozamia was processed to remove toxins and yielded a carbohydrate-rich paste which was baked. The Aboriginal name for this tree, burrawang, survives as the street name Burrawong in Clifton Gardens. (A list of Mosman’s Aboriginal place names can be found in Dalton “Jack” Carroll’s bookStreets of Mosman in the Library).

The people also hunted mammals and reptiles. Each of these plants and creatures would have been linked totemically by birthright to an individual or group within the tribe, and it would have been the responsibility of that person or that group to ensure its survival. For example there might have been a prohibition or “taboo” on taking fruit from a certain area at a certain season; or perhaps a particular area containing a spring was out of bounds so as to maintain the purity of the water supply. There would have been a certain amount of ritual attached to these practices which were essentially ways of conserving resources and knowledge for future generations. Many thousands of years of intimate contact had given the people a deep understanding of their environment, but almost all of this knowledge has been lost.

The Arrival of the British

When the British convict ships first sailed into Sydney Harbour their arrival would not have been entirely unexpected, since news of their presence in Botany Bay would have travelled north very quickly overland. Some people indeed would have remembered that eighteen seasons earlier another strange, huge and winged vessel had passed across the gap between The Heads on its way north.

Perhaps it was with some sense of relief that they realised that the vessels contained beings who appeared to be quite human, so that when the first meetings took place the people of the Sydney Harbour tribes responded in much the same way that they would have to any visiting group, that is with a guarded and ritualised courtesy. A few days after the landing at Sydney Cove the Kuringgai people of this area showed Captain Hunter’s survey party at Middle Head where to make a safe landing. Lieutenant Bradley reported that both parties then danced together.

Being responsible for that land the Aboriginal people probably believed that they would remain in control of this relationship, but of course that fateful meeting was the beginning of the end for this group of people. Within a few years many had died of disease and the survivors had moved away or had been dispersed. Living on the clan lands of their neighbours, these people would have begun the process of working out strategies to maintain their obligations to the land they had been forced to leave. The colonists, for their part unaware of the richness of the food resources all around them, depended largely on a line of supply that stretched all the way back to the southern African continent and even to England! After a few years of unsuccessful attempts at farming and erratic resupplying from Britain the colony was on the brink of extinction by starvation.

By 1815 all the original inhabitants of this area were either dead or living on the clan lands of other groups such as the Kuringgai people of the rugged Broken Bay area further north. Under enormous stress, the people of that area had given up on the cooperative approach and were becoming openly hostile. In an attempt to pacify them Governor Macquarie gave them a grant of land which the earliest map shows covered the whole of Middle Head. (Florence’s Trig Survey of Port Jackson, A.O. Map 4752). Huts were erected and the people were also given some seed, some farming tools and a boat. With their own economy disintegrating the Aboriginal people were unable to make a living farming the infertile soils of this area, and indeed successive European farmers also failed in this attempt. The famous “King” Bungaree was put in charge of this group of about 60 people, which may well have included some of those whose “born country” this land actually was, members of the Cammeraigal and Borogegal clans. It is very likely that somewhere in the area are the archaeological remains of this failed experiment in race relations, but no-one knows exactly where the huts were erected and the attempts at cultivation took place.

The Future of Aboriginal Mosman

As far as we know, no descendants of the original inhabitants live in Mosman now, but there are around 80,000 Aboriginal Australians living in the Sydney Basin as a whole, some of whom would be descended from the people who lived in this area. The world of the Borogegal and Cammeraigal people of the Kuringgai tribe remains for us all to experience wherever the built environment has not totally obscured the natural environment. Bushland, sandstone, sea and sky remain … sometimes just a glimpse, sometimes as an expansive and breathtaking view. But we should not take it all for granted. Because some headlands were reserved for defence occupation since the early nineteenth century land that would otherwise have been developed has been quarantined for 200 years. Some of it is in public ownership as part of The Sydney Harbour National Park and another large parcel is to be returned to all Australians under a new trust. It is up to all of us: Mosman Council, The National Parks and Wildlife Service, The Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council and the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust to care for this land. More than anyone else though, the future of Aboriginal Mosman depends on us, the Australian Citizens.

Sources

• D Benson & J Howell Taken For Granted: the Bushland of Sydney and Its Suburbs Kangaroo Press Sydney 1990
• Heather Goodall Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in NSW, 1770 – 1972 Allen & Unwin 1996
• Margrit Koettig Aboriginal Sites in the Mosman Municipality Vols 1 & 2 Sydney 1991 (copy in Mosman Library Local Studies)
• Gavin Souter Mosman: a History Melbourne University Press 1994

Credits

A publication of The Mosman Aboriginal Reconciliation Community Group, with the assistance of Mosman Council, The Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council and The Guringai Local Aboriginal Education Consultative Group.

© Anne Cook 2000.

With thanks to Annette Webb of Eora College of TAFE Chippendale, who supplied illustrations.

Language and Words

The arrival of the first European settlers had a dramatic effect within the first 10 years on the people of the various Aboriginal nations, tribes and clans who had lived in the Sydney basin region for 40,000 years.  It is now well known that European diseases like small pox and measles began devastating numbers very rapidly.

The European settlers were completely unprepared for the new climate and soil conditions they found around Sydney Harbour.  Their plan was always to transplant British methods of food production to the new southern land – dairy and beef cattle, pigs and chooks for meat, plus growing wheat, oats, potatoes and vegetable crops.

Few of the convicts, settlers or soldiers had any experience of farming or animal husbandry.  The tools they brought out on the 11 ships of the First Fleet were not up to the job of preparing land for crops.  Starvation was a constant fear for the first 10 years.

The Europeans were so busy trying to grow food for their survival in what they found to be a harsh land that they didn’t spend a lot of time recording what existed of the Aboriginal lifestyle that they had totally disrupted in the Sydney region from 1788.

We now know that there was more than 600 different Aboriginal languages spoken on the mainland of Australia.  Language academics have now produced quite detailed maps that speculate on the boundaries of these languages and local dialects.  Interestingly we know far more about the Aboriginal languages in areas that were touched most recently by European settlers.  These places tend to be so isolated that academics had tools to record these languages still being spoken by people, for whom English was not a first language.

By contrast in the Sydney region the effect of disease was so rapid that some historians suggest that 90% of the original population around Sydney Harbour and the coastal strip were wiped out before 1800.  When this occurred Aboriginals from outside areas sometimes moved into the environs of Sydney Harbour, bring with them a language from somewhere else.   Quite a few Officers, scientists and educated settlers wrote down words that they heard being spoken,  but obviously there was huge variation when the sound of spoken words was record with Roman letters on paper.

Many of the words that were recorded in the first 12 years of the convict settlement were attached to the geographic features of the region.   We still see them and use them every day in the names of suburbs, streets, headlands, rivers and bays. But because these words are so familiar  few people stop to think about where these names came from

• Cammeray
• Cronulla
• Dee Why
• Parramatta
• Warringah
• Woollahra
• Woolloomooloo

Some of these Aboriginal names were adopted very quickly by the new settlers and have survived 220 years.   Others have almost faded away completely, and can only be found in specialist books, government records or academic papers.

• Circular Quay:     War Ran or Warrane
• North Head:         Bora or Boree
• Chowder Bay:       Koree
• Middle Head:       Kuba Kaba
• Bradleys Head:    Booragy

The following sources are good places to start if you want to explore the meanings of Aboriginal words related to your own region or suburb in the Sydney region

• http://press.anu.edu.au//apps/bookworm/view/Aboriginal%20Placenames/10521/ch01.xhtml
• http://darugweavers.tripod.com/ourblackandwhitefamily/id37.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Language

The Bungaree Keeping Place, which is proposed for Middle Head,  should awaken interest in the languages and words used by the original people who were living in Sydney in 1788.   It has already made me look up the word that it is believed was applied to Middle Head – Kuba Kaba or Gubbuh Gubbuh or Caba-Caba, or Ca-ba Ca-ba.  The spelling is far less important than the sound of the words,  and the spirit of the past that they stir up in your mind.

 

Bungaree and Mosman

Aborigines are known to have occupied the Australian continent for at least 40,000 years.  The Borogegal tribe inhabited the Mosman area.  The best known Aborigine in Mosman’s history was Bungaree.  Bungaree (c1775-1830) grew up in the traditional Aboriginal environment which his people had enjoyed for many thousands of years. With the coming of the European settlement his life became dramatically different. By the time he was 20 most of his tribe had died of smallpox.  By the time he was 26 he had joined British explorers on voyages to the far north and had circumnavigated Australia with Matthew Flinders.

He became leader of his tribe, was given land at Georges Head and enjoyed the patronage of Governor Macquarie.  He greeted newcomers as their ships entered Sydney Harbour and became friends with the Russian explorers and acquainted with the French. During his whole life he lived in the traditional Aboriginal way.  He hunted and fished and provided for his family.  He was a well-known identity in Sydney and his activities were often reported in the newspapers of the day.  His exploits and descriptions of his way of life were recorded in the formal records of the European leaders and in their diaries and published works. His image was painted many times and shown in London, Paris and Moscow.  Throughout his life he retained the respect of the people of his own world and earned the respect of the newcomers from the European world.  He was the first individual known to have been called an “Australian”.

Source: http://www.mosman.nsw.gov.au/mosman/history/from-1788

Who was Bungaree?

During the early years of the British penal colony at Sydney Cove, under the governorship of Arthur Phillip, an adventurous young man named Bungaree was becoming familiar with the colonists.

It is believed that Bungaree was born about 1770 and lived his early years in the region of Brisbane Water and Broken Bay.

 

He went exploring with Matthew Flinders, he knew some of the Sydneysiders and he seemed to have liked the bustling life of the town.   In about 1800 he made camp near Kirribilli and brought some of his extended family down from the north to the Harbour.  They must have liked what they saw too, and Kirribilli become one of their many regular camps or stopping places.

This meant that the influence of Bungaree and his large family made itself felt over the north and south of Broken Bay – the same area where the Guringai language was spoken. That’s the same area that we recognise today as ‘Guringai language country’, and the area covered by the North Coastal part of the website A History of Aboriginal Sydney.

Source: http://historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au/north-coastal