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Australia special: Aboriginal Sydney

By Adrian Bridge
Adrian Bridge takes a novel tour of Sydney, through the eyes of an all too often forgotten culture.

Tribal Warrior promotional photo

9 April 2008 - The Telegraph UK - The greeting could have come from just about anyone in Australia. And the name had a comfortingly familiar ring, too. “G’day,” said Shane, “and welcome aboard. This afternoon we’re going to show you Sydney as you’ve never seen it before. Help yourselves to a drink from the cool box, then sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Shane Phillips was our captain for an outing on the Tribal Warrior, a venerable vessel dating back to 1899 and originally used as a pearling lugger. For almost 10 years the boat has been owned and run by a group of Aborigines, whose aim is to provide tourists with an alternative take on Australia’s best known city — and to help reinstate some pride in a culture and way of life that has all but disappeared. Welcome to Sydney from an Aboriginal perspective.

The tour kicked off on the quay right in front of the Sydney Opera House, the extraordinary shell-like structures of which were gleaming in the early afternoon sunlight. This fabulous building is the quintessential symbol of modern Sydney, but it also hints at a past when Shane’s ancestors used to fish around here with simple hooks and vines and discard the shells on the peninsula of land today known as Bennelong Point. Those shells in turn were used by the early settlers to make lime for mortar for some of the first buildings to line these shores.

As we set out into the harbour, we looked back to see the high-rise towers and the huge steel arch bridge that today define the city and tried to imagine how it might have been before. “The history of this place doesn’t begin with the arrival of Cook,” said Shane. “We’ve been here for thousands of years.

“That bit of land on which the Opera House stands was what we called Jubgalee, meaning white mud/clay; the Circular Quay, the main ferry terminal, was called Warrane, meeting place...”

Although the Aborigines are famous for their rock art, the fact that nothing was recorded in writing means that the history lesson was a bit brief. Indeed, Shane admitted that many ancient Aborigine words are only known today because one early settler, Lieutenant William Dawes, formed an attachment with a local woman called Patyegarang, who taught him the language of the Eora people - which he recorded in notebooks.

During the course of the afternoon, we gathered that theirs was a simpler, more harmonious way of life punctuated by the rhythms of nature, the need to hunt and age-old rituals - including the chilling-sounding removal of incisor teeth as part of an initiation ceremony. We were told that Aborigines lived very communally and had respect for their elders. There were many tribes and hundreds of dialects. An idyllic picture was painted of a people in tune with both themselves and their surroundings.

I had expected a bit of a diatribe when it came to the arrival of Captain Cook in 1770, but the facts were dealt with in a matter-of-fact, albeit rather resigned way. “All they seemed to want was for us to leave, they just saw us as primitive and barbaric,” we were told. “They fired muskets at us; we hurled stones and spears.” The commentary was read from a script and lacked a certain passion. Or maybe it was too sore a subject to deal with any other way.

By now we had passed the Botanical Gardens, from which every night flying fox bats emerge in their thousands to swoop over the city, and were coming alongside the exclusive enclave of Woolloomooloo (“Waalamool”), where the actor Russell Crowe has a AUS $14 million (£6.5 million) penthouse.

Our goal was the small, uninhabited Clark Island, traditionally an important source of fish and a popular meeting place for Aboriginal people. The island was subsequently turned into a vegetable garden by one Lieutenant Ralph Clark.

We went ashore and were shown ancient cave shelters, a selection of edible plants (knowledge about which was eagerly sought by the early settlers). We were also told how, after catching the fish, Aborigines used to cook them over fires made in their canoes.

The finale was something quite extraordinary: a demonstration of original Aboriginal dancing performed on Clark Island. Terry, one of the crew, and Stephen and Trey, two 12-year-old boys, had painted their bodies with white and ochre paint and picked a collection of spears.

The unmistakable sound of the didgeridoo filled the air and, over the next 20 minutes, we were treated to a Welcome Ceremony and a collection of traditional routines, including a spear-fishing dance popular in Barrier Reef territory, a kangaroo skipping dance and the dance of something that sounded like the williwagta blackbird. (“Just spell it how you like,” I was advised.)

The boys appeared hesitant and uncertain of the moves. Terry later explained that he had been trying to teach them the dances in order to keep this culture alive and to instil in a new generation a genuine pride in its roots. (“Instead of resigning ourselves to a life of alcoholism and substance abuse, we should be proud of who we are.”)

Chanting, jumping and gesticulating, the three dancers tried to breathe new life into rhythms that seemed totally out of sync with both the times and the surroundings.

It was a genuinely surreal experience as we sat watching their slightly self-conscious movements played out against a backdrop of the modern Sydney skyline and a harbour full of Sydneysiders out enjoying a Saturday afternoon sail.

“It’s time to head back,” said Shane. “There’s tea and Johnny cakes on board.”

Source: The Telegraph

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