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Out of bounds

By Jane Burton Taylor

11 January 2007 - Corrugated iron, a bit of furniture and a clothes hoist out the back makes a home.
Standing in his makeshift kitchen in a shack on the beachfront at Bulli, Dootch Kennedy looks out a window, his eyes settling on nearby bush. "That stand of banksia, that is where it is," he announces.

He is talking about the place where a traditional Aboriginal Kuradji, or clever man, is buried. It is the reason he lives in a shack made from discarded building materials with an unlikely clothes hoist out the back.
At Sandon Point, between Thirroul and Bulli, on the coast south of metropolitan Sydney, Dootch's shack represents the battle between residents, including the local Aboriginal community, and the developer Stockland.

Kennedy tells how it started in March 1998 when a local man, Tony Stephens, noticed a skull jutting from the sand dunes. Stephens called Kennedy, who was head of the local land council at the time.

"I requested they put up a temporary breakwater," Kennedy recalls. "Over the next six weeks we had two meetings with the community." They decided to exhume the body and then rebury it.

When they exhumed the body, archaeologists estimated it was between 2000 and 6000 years old.

Numerous Aboriginal remains had been found in the immediate area, but this body was special.

Because the man had been buried on his side (rather than in a crouching position, like others found there), it was recognised as a ceremonial burial. Alongside the body was a bag containing, among other things, a needle carved from a snapper bone, another clue of someone highly regarded.

More research uncovered an Aboriginal tool-making site on the ridge that runs out to Sandon Point behind the beach - a study by the Australian National University estimated it could contain five million artefacts - and the wetlands that hug McCauleys Beach below the ridge revealed middens and women's ceremonial sites.

"They would have taken advantage of the mullet and turtles in the creek," Kennedy says. "There would have been water fowl as well. It was like Woolworths for them."

For Kennedy the discoveries took on personal meaning in November 2000 when a friend phoned to say the local council was giving the developer Stocklands approval for a six-stage housing estate on the land. Kennedy decided to set up a tent embassy in protest and has been there ever since.

"We moved in on Boxing Day 2000, me and my cousin, Peter," Kennedy says. "We came in to set up camp to raise awareness of what was here. We just had a little tarp. One of the local residents gave us a tent. People in the community came in with cookies, cakes and milk."

The current tent embassy is mark 2. The first burnt down after a fundraiser in 2004. There were five people in the camp at the time; no one was hurt but many of Kennedy's paintings were destroyed.
He was shaken. "I said to my brother, 'We are going to pack up and go.' My brother said, 'No, we're rebuilding.' "

Today only the donated clothes hoist survives from the original camp. But, like its predecessor, the tent embassy is pieced together from donated materials: corrugated iron, old windows and timber. The shack is tiny with just three small rooms.

Posters and news clippings about the protest line the walls and in the sitting room is a large mural painted by Kennedy. Two people can barely fit into the kitchen space in which a filing cabinet serves as the kitchen bench and a gas cylinder is hooked up to a camping hot plate for cooking. The cooking utensils hang along the top of the window above the cooker, which overlooks the estuary, and pots and pans fit into adjacent shelving. A compact living space behind the kitchen doubles as a second bedroom, while in the main bedroom, a double bed takes up most of the floor and clothes are stored in crates stacked along the wall. The bathroom is a small outdoor loo and when it rains, the iron roof leaks.

The limited space means most time is spent outdoors where an eclectic collection of furniture is arranged to take advantage of the spectacular views out to the ocean. An open firepit acts as a secondary cooking and meeting place.

The overall effect is one of ordered chaos, with household items arranged wherever they can neatly fit. A tarpaulin at the back of the shack stretches over a collection of extra mattresses and bedding to cope with the transient population at the embassy. Kennedy is a long-term resident, the closest thing the embassy has to a permanent tenant, but others frequently come and go.

For the moment, Kennedy is firmly settled in the shack overlooking the burial site of his people's ancestral clever man. The debate on the future of the site continues but the Aboriginal flag, held aloft on a recycled boat mast, is still flying.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

For more information go to www.sandon-point.org.au

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