Australia Story

Australia Story:

By: Christine McFarlane

On the other side of the globe Aboriginal communities face similar colonial impacts as their counterparts- the First Nations people of Turtle Island.

“Colonization is not just about the settling of land, it is also a continued practice of dispossessing the Indigenous people through various means,” says Dr. Karen O’Brien, a lecturer in the Indigenous Studies program at the University of Sydney. On this July day, O’Brien’s class includes two Anishinaabe students from the University of Toronto who are participating in a five-week immersion program to learn about Aboriginal Australia.

O’Brien states “upon the time of contact in 1788, the Aboriginal population was estimated to be at 1 million.” It was after contact and the complete alteration of landscape that led to the extinction of native fauna and flora that “Aboriginal people became affected” and their ‘population became decimated through disease, social policies and violence and dropped to around 400,000 people.”

 Social policies in Australia have included the government-sanctioned abduction of Indigenous children—known as the “Stolen Generation”—and the implementation of the Aborigine Protection Board, a government agency established in 1909 that was given the power to remove children without parental consent and a court order. 

Though there was an attempt through social policies to remove Indigenous Australians from their place of origin, it is evident through the different lectures given by the professors at the University of Sydney that Indigenous Australians are anything but removed from their country, languages and traditions and that their heritage is alive and thriving.

Cultural identity for Indigenous Australians is similar to that of the First Nations people of Canada. They see land and culture as being inextricably tied together and they convey this through various forms of creative expression, whether that is through visual arts, music, dance or literature.

Throughout their time at the University of Sydney, students were introduced to various mediums to dispel any misplaced notions that they may have had about the Indigenous peoples of Australia, and learned that there are several hundred Indigenous peoples of Australia with many of their tribes existing before the British colonization of Australia in 1788. These groupings include the Eora; Gadigal; Guringai; Wangal; Gammeraigal and Wallumedegel people.

Site visits included visits to the New South Wales Art Gallery, the New South Wales Parliament House, a Tribal Warrior Cruise, where students embarked on a journey by taking a boat across the Sydney Harbor to an island for an authentic Aboriginal cultural performance.  They also watched Indigenous directed movies such as the film “Ten Canoes,” that was born out of a collaboration with the Indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil and the non-Indigenous direcot Rolf de Heer, watched a narrative,”One Night the Moon,” directed by Rachel Perkins that showed the practical and moral implications that overt racism played out between the non-Indigenous and Indigenous people on the frontier, a documentary film on Australia’s grandmother of literature, Kath Walker, who was a poet, activist and public speaker, who in her time was “largely responsible for a change in attitude towards her people.”

Students also gained knowledge about the traditional food of the Ngemba Tribe of North West New South Wales when Sharon Winsor of Thulli Dreaming’s gave a bush tucker workshop that involved native plants, bush fruits, traditional cooking, plant uses and medicinal uses, and bush tucker tastings with damper, native jams and rainforest punch.  The workshop also consisted of Winsor discussing the various instruments used in hunting and the giving of an emu caller (a traditional instrument used in hunting that imitates the call of an emu) to each student to bring home with them.

Outside of class time, students did their own sightseeing with a few going to see the sacred Three Sisters formation in the Blue Mountains- The Blue Mountains region is an area close to Sydney in New South Wales Australia, and is less than an hours drive from Sydney. The name given to this grouping of 900 metre peaks refers to a legend of three Katoomba sisters who wanted to marry three brothers from the Nepean tribe, contrary to established custom. A witch doctor transformed the sisters into rocks to protect them in an ensuing battle, but the shaman was killed before he could reverse the spell. This legend is claimed to come from an Indigenous Australian Dreamtime legend of the Gundungurra People of Katoomba New South Wales, Australia, an Indigenous tribe whose land surrounds the Blue Mountains area.