Abstract
Of all the competing representations of Bondi Beach, perhaps the sharpest concern Sydney’s Aboriginal people, the Eora. In this chapter, I outline the dominant representations of the Eora as presented by early settler colonists, and the land they occupied which is today known as the eastern suburbs. These representations cast the eastern suburbs as barren, and its original inhabitants as living in a timeless and passive relationship with the land. I then introduce more recent historical and archaeological scholarship that presents contrasting representations of material abundance, Eora social dynamism, adaptability and careful management of the environment, and complex and entangled relationships between the Eora and settler colonists. Most importantly, this scholarship highlights the absence of an environmental philosophy among Australia’s non-Aboriginal inhabitants.
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Notes
- 1.
Christine Nicholls, ‘“Dreamtime” and “The Dreaming”—An introduction’, The Conversation, 23 January 2014, https://theconversation.com/dreamtime-and-the-dreaming-an-introduction-20833. See also Lorraine Robertson, Visualising the D’harawal seasons and climatic cycles (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, 2012), 159, and Nonie Sharp, Saltwater People: The Waves of Memory (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002), 52–53. Nicholls argues that ‘the morpheme “dream”’ has been popularised as ‘a generic translation for all Indigenous Australian belief systems’. She traces the origins of this translation to the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer who applied ‘dream times’ to the complex system of religious belief among the Arrernte people of central Australia. ‘“Dreamtime” and “The Dreaming”: Who dreamed up these terms?’ The Conversation, 29 January 2014, https://theconversation.com/dreamtime-and-the-dreaming-who-dreamed-up-these-terms-20835.
- 2.
Val Attenbrow, Pre-colonial Aboriginal land and resource use in Centennial, Moore and Queens Parks: Assessment of historical and archaeological evidence for Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust conservation management plan, Report prepared for Beyond Consulting and Connybeare Morrison & Partners, 2002, 14, and Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, Second Edition (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010), 39. Aboriginal elder Frances Bodkin opens the door to occupation stretching back 120,000 years. See, Robertson, Visualising the D’harawal, 199. Grace Karskens cites evidence of Aboriginal people occupying New South Wales 50,000 years ago but notes that there is no definitive date for their arrival in Sydney. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010), 27. Attenbrow refers to one source that places Aboriginal people in Parramatta 35,000 years ago. Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 152. Peter Turbet simply states that Aboriginal people have been in the Sydney region ‘for at least 20,000 years’. The Aborigines of the Sydney District Before 1788 (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1989), 3. John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga note a tendency among archaeologists to claim older and older periods of occupation only to see them disproved. Prehistory of Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), 143. Palaeontologists, archaeologists and historians continue to debate when Aboriginal people first entered Sahul (the larger continent of Australia and New Guinea), what drew them and how long it took them to disperse over the continent. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, 130–133 and 169–170, and Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu (Broome, Western Australia: Magabala, 2018), 181 and 190–197.
- 3.
If Aboriginal people were in Sydney before the last glacial period, as Tim Flannery suggests, then they would have ‘hunted on the grassy flats as the sea withdrew’ and ‘then fished over them’ as the sea ‘flooded back’. ‘The sandstone city’, in The Birth of Sydney (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999), 11–12. According to Attenbrow, the sea reached the high sandstone cliffs on the coast with which we are familiar by 11,000 to 10,000 years ago. It continued to rise as much as another 2 meters until about 7000 years ago when it began to fall until 1400 years ago. Between 7000 and 2000 years ago the sea oscillated through around 2 metres. Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 37–39 and 154.
- 4.
David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales from its First Settlement in January 1788 to August 1801, Second Edition (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804), 8.
- 5.
Arthur Phillip, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay with an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island (London: John Stockdale, 1789), 63. Lieutenant William Bradley identified the sand hills at Bondi as ‘a useful landmark that alerted ships arriving from the south that they were near Port Jackson’. A Voyage to New South Wales, December 1786–May 1792 (Sydney: State Library of NSW and University of Sydney Library, 2015), 116.
- 6.
John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island with the Discoveries which have been made in New South Wales and in the Southern Ocean (London: John Stockdale, 1793), 160. Hunter did, however, apparently admire the ‘most beautiful flowering heath’. Collins, Account of the English Colony, 497.
- 7.
Edward Mills, ‘Ben Buckler: Another version’, Sun, 4 July 1915, 10.
- 8.
John White, Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (London: J. Debrett, 1790), 133.
- 9.
Flannery, ‘Sandstone city’, 7.
- 10.
Bradley, Voyage to New South Wales, 108.
- 11.
Collins, Account of the English Colony, 556–7.
- 12.
Watkin Tench, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (London: J. Debrett, 1789 / Sydney: University of Sydney, 1998), 38.
- 13.
Bradley, Voyage to New South Wales, 132.
- 14.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 76 and 78.
- 15.
Tench, Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, 57.
- 16.
Bradley, Voyage to New South Wales, 132 and 135. Obed West claimed to have personally seen whales beached at Bondi on three separate occasions. ‘Old and new Sydney: XIX. Our harbour and ocean bays’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 October 1882, 9.
- 17.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 64 and 67–68.
- 18.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 70.
- 19.
Attenbrow, Pre-colonial Aboriginal land, 31.
- 20.
Bradley, Voyage to New South Wales, 134.
- 21.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 71.
- 22.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 78.
- 23.
Karskens, Colony, 273–4.
- 24.
In a fivefold vegetation classification system produced by Doug Benson and Jocelyn Howell, Bondi country comprises ‘Unstable Sand’, ‘Turpentine Ironbark Forest’, ‘Freshwater Sedge Swamp’, ‘Heath on Sandstone’ and ‘Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub on Sand’. Taken for Granted: The Bushland of Sydney and Its Suburbs (Sydney: Kangaroo Press / Royal Botanic Gardens, 1990), 90. Waverley Municipal Council recognises fifteen natural vegetation communities: Beach Grassland, Sea-cliff Grassland, Sea-cliff Sedgeland Carex pumila, Sea-cliff Sedgeland Baumea juncea, Sea-cliff Sedgeland Ficinia nodosa, Sea-cliff Herbland Lobelia alata, Sea-cliff Herbland Dianella congesta, Sea-cliff Heath, Sea-cliff Scub, Sandstone Moist Heath, Sandstone Dry Scrub, Low Woodland / Low Forest, Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub, Fernland, Imperata Grassland. Waverley Municipal Council and Sydney Bush Regeneration Company, Waverley flora study report, 2010, 24.
- 25.
Joseph Maiden, The Useful Native Plants of Australia (Including Tasmania) (Sydney: Turner and Henderson, 1889), 108.
- 26.
Rob Inkpen and Graham Wilson, Science, Philosophy and Physical Geography, Second Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 63–64.
- 27.
Maiden , Useful Native Plants, 232, 436 and 569–570. Maiden published several articles concerning the stabilisation of the sand dunes at Bondi (e.g. ‘The sand-drift problem in New South Wales’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 37 [1903], 82–106). Scribbly gum grew in patches of woodland notably below the major ridge-lines sheltered from the extremes of coastal or westerly winds and in deeper soils such as on the north-facing slopes of Edward, Francis and Wellington streets. Swamp tea tree grew in the lagoons behind the sandhills at Bondi.
- 28.
Benson and Howell, Taken for Granted, Jennifer Isaacs, Bush Food: Aboriginal Food and Herbal Medicine (Sydney: Ure Smith Press, 1992), Paul Irish, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth, 2017), Attenbrow, Pre-colonial Aboriginal land, and Robertson, Visualising the D’harawal. Pascoe adds to this picture in his accounts of the food preservation techniques used by Aboriginal peoples. Dark Emu, 148–149.
- 29.
Benson and Howell, Taken for Granted, 94–97, and Robertson, Visualising the D’harawal, 329–337. According to Frances Bodkin and Lorraine Robertson, Aboriginal people understood that the full medicinal properties of different plants depended upon a range of factors including proximity to other plants and weather conditions such as frosts and combinations of rain and temperature. D’harawal: Climate and Natural Resources (Sussex Inlet, New South Wales: Envirobook, 2013), 91.
- 30.
R. J. Etheridge provides the first official report of the workshop, described as an area ‘covered with thousands’ of ‘chips, splinters, and points’, in ‘Report for the year 1900’, Records of the Australian Museum, 4, 4 (1901), 165–166. A particularly severe easterly storm exposed the workshop just as an earlier one had unearthed a female Aboriginal skull and several ‘Aboriginal tomahawks’. See, ‘Donations to the Australian Museum during February, 1855’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 March 1855, 5, and Thomas Ormond O’Brien, ‘Reminiscences of Bondi’, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 8 (1923), 364.
- 31.
R. J. Etheridge and T. Whitelegge, ‘Aboriginal workshops on the coast of New South Wales and their contents’, Records of the Australian Museum, 6, 4 (1907), 238, and Frederick McCarthy, ‘An analysis of the knapped implements from eight Elouera industry stations on the south coast of New South Wales’, Records of the Australian Museum, 21, 3 (1943), 145. Bondi points have subsequently been found in Western Australia, south-east South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and south-east Queensland.
- 32.
Frederick McCarthy, Australian Aboriginal Stone Implements, Second Edition (Sydney: The Australian Museum Trust, 1976), 44. For a good illustration see, Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, plate 19. Of course, this simple description belies the contentious nature of classifying stone tools. In McCarthy’s words, ‘marginal variations’ between forms makes it ‘almost impossible to establish’ clear distinctions that ‘in many instances [are] arbitrary’ (25). See also, Peter Hiscock and Val Attenbrow, ‘Backed into a corner’, Australian Archaeology, 42 (1996), 64–65. The precise source of the stone used in the manufacture of Bondi points at Bondi, which Etheridge and Whitelegge said were made from siliceous material, predominantly cherts and quartzites (Aboriginal workshops, 233), is unknown. William Clarke (see Chap. 2) described the area around Meriverie as ‘strewn with quartz pebbles’. ‘On the transmutation of rocks in Australasia’, Transactions of the Philosophical Society of New South Wales, 1862–1865 (Sydney: Reading and Wellbank, 1866), 301. See also, O’Brien, ‘Reminiscences of Bondi’, 365.
- 33.
McCarthy, ‘Analysis of the knapped implements’, 149.
- 34.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 100 and 101. Attenbrow also refers to what she calls ‘manufacturing debris’ (101). In this context, McCarthy adds an important point, namely, that specialised tools are ultimately ideal types. For every perfect product there were many failures, although these would not necessarily have been discarded but probably used in other ways. Aboriginal Stone Implements, 12.
- 35.
See, for example, Peter Hiscock and Val Attenbrow, ‘Early Holocene backed artefacts from Australia’, Archaeology in Oceania, 33 (1998), 49–62, Val Attenbrow, Gail Robertson and Peter Hiscock, ‘The changing abundance of backed artefacts in south-eastern Australia: A response to Holocene climate change?’ Journal of Archaeological Science, 36 (2009), 2765–2770, and Pascoe, Dark Emu, 58–60.
- 36.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 98, 102–103 and 154–157. Attenbrow identifies a correlation between the abundance of backed artefacts and a change in climate. See also, Irish, Hidden in Plain View, 15–16, and Karskens, Colony, 41.
- 37.
D’harawal made fish hooks from the inner shell of the marine turban snail. Producers used stone files to abrade the shell until a hole appeared in the centre; the hole was widened and then filed into C- and J-shapes, between 13 and 50 mm long, with a notch at one end to which a line (made from twisted plant fibre) was attached. The pearly iridescent shell surface lured fish and made bait unnecessary. Val Attenbrow, ‘Aboriginal fishing in Port Jackson, and the introduction of shell fish-hooks to coastal New South Wales, Australia’, in Daniel Lunney, Pat Hutchings and Dieter Hochuli (eds), The Natural History of Sydney (Sydney: Royal Zoological Society, 2010), 22–24.
- 38.
Sandra Bowdler, ‘Hook, line, and dilly bag: An interpretation of an Australian coastal shell midden’, Mankind, 10, 4 (1976), 256.
- 39.
Attenbrow, ‘Aboriginal fishing in Port Jackson’, 30.
- 40.
Irish, Hidden in Plain View, 16 and Karskens, Colony, 40–41.
- 41.
Attenbrow, ‘Aboriginal fishing in Port Jackson’, 30.
- 42.
Bodkin and Robertson, D’harawal, 68–73.
- 43.
Bodkin and Robertson, D’harawal, 54–63. A person’s life was considered to consist of six mudong cycles (64) and ‘traditionally, every D’harawal was given a name for each of the cycles’ which meant that ‘one person could be known by up to eight names’ (65).
- 44.
Djuli lasted up to twenty moons, dyirringong as few as eight, dagurayagu seventeen to twenty, goray’walan fifteen, kanguama twelve, dulamai twelve, illagunuman fifteen and garuk twelve to fifteen.
- 45.
Bodkin and Robertson, D’harawal, 51, 56 and 63.
- 46.
Bodkin and Robertson, D’harawal, 2 and 16–53. D’harawal seasons broadly correspond to the following months: murrai’yunggory (September–October), gooray’murrai (November–December), gadalung marool (January–February), bana’marrai’yung (March–May), tugarah tuli (June–July), tugarah gunya’marri (August).
- 47.
Nicholls , ‘“Dreamtime” and “The Dreaming”: Who dreamed up these terms?’ Nicholls says these stories make little attempt to mask their fundamentally didactic purpose: to teach about the sacred geographies of specific cultural landscapes which people learned so that they could live in specific ‘country’ according to local lore. ‘“Dreamings” and dreaming narratives: What’s the relationship?’ The Conversation, 6 February 2014, https://theconversation.com/dreamings-and-dreaming-narratives-whats-the-relationship-20837.
- 48.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 148–149. For details of the sites, see 168–170. Several human forms appear interspersed among the marine figures in the northern cluster of engravings on the golf course. In 1899 government surveyor William Campbell reported an engraving of a lone ‘figure of a man in a warlike and energetic corroboree posture’ around 560 metres north of the sewer tower. W. D. Campbell and O. Trickett, Aboriginal Carvings of Port Jackson and Broken Bay (Sydney: Government Printer, 1899), 12 and plate 2, figure 13.
- 49.
Karskens, Colony, 31.
- 50.
Karskens, Colony, 275–76.
- 51.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 55.
- 52.
Attenbrow, Pre-colonial Aboriginal land, 29–30.
- 53.
Attenbrow, Pre-colonial Aboriginal land, 7.
- 54.
See also Pascoe, Dark Emu.
- 55.
Attenbrow, Pre-colonial Aboriginal land, 5, and Irish, Hidden in Plain View, 17–18.
- 56.
Irish, Hidden in Plain View, 17–18.
- 57.
Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011), xxii. This representation has gained popularity, and contention, through Pascoe’s Dark Emu. For a critique of Pascoe and Dark Emu from an archaeological perspective, see Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-Gathers? The Dark Emu Debate (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2021). Sutton and Walshe categorically reject the term ‘farming’ as applied to the Aboriginal way of life; they emphasise the complexity and sophistication of hunting and gathering.
- 58.
Rhys Jones, ‘Fire-stick farming’, Australian Natural History, 16 (1969), 224–228. At least one early Berewalgal settler was aware of the concept. In his recollections, Edward Curr wrote: ‘I refer to the fire-stick; for the blackfellow was constantly setting fire to the grass and trees, both accidentally, and systematically for hunting purposes. Living principally on wild roots and animals, he tilled his land and cultivated his pastures with fire’. Recollections of Squatting in Victoria, 1841–1851 (Melbourne: Robertson, 1883), 189–90.
- 59.
Hunter, Transactions at Port Jackson, 69.
- 60.
Flannery, ‘Sandstone city’, 15. According to Flannery, management involved regular burning to limit the fuel loads to a couple of tonnes per hectare. ‘Fires of this type’, said Flannery, ‘are cool and rarely widespread’. ‘Animal species need old growth areas for shelter and patches of young growth for food’. The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1994), 219–220, 380 and 381. Flannery notes that in the absence of Aboriginal management, the vegetation becomes denser and consists of ‘fire promoting species which periodically burn in a vast conflagration. These fires are exceptionally hot’, with fuel loads regularly exceeding 10–15 tonnes per hectare, and destroy biodiversity, drive fire-sensitive plants to extinction and destroy the mosaics of vegetation on which animals depend. Future Eaters, 380 and 381.
- 61.
Flannery, Future Eaters, 220.
- 62.
Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 338–339.
- 63.
Catherine Warne (ed.), ‘The Old South Head Road’, in A Pictorial History of Eastern Suburbs (Sydney: Kingsclear, 2010), 62. Bondi Junction was originally named Tea Gardens after the Tea Gardens’ Hotel. For a history of South Head Road see, Clive Faro, ‘To the lighthouse! The South Head Road and place-making in early New South Wales’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 84, 2 (1998), 109–129.
- 64.
Carter, Road to Botany Bay, 338-339.
- 65.
Attenbrow, Sydney’s Aboriginal Past, 42.
- 66.
Tim Flannery, ‘After the future: Australia’s new extinction crisis’, Quarterly Essay, 48 (2012), 57, and Flannery, The Future Eaters, 225.
- 67.
Flannery, The Future Eaters, 208–216 and 229–236, and Flannery, ‘After the future’, 38–43.
- 68.
For example, Stephen Wroe, Christine Argot and Christopher Dickman, ‘On the rarity of big fierce carnivores and primacy of isolation and area: Tracking large mammalian carnivore diversity on two isolated continents’, Proceedings: Biological Sciences, 271, 1544 (2004), 1203–1211. Pascoe, Dark Emu, 124.
- 69.
John Benson, ‘Beautiful lies: Correspondence’, Quarterly Essay, 13 (2004), 128.
- 70.
Flannery , ‘After the future’, 47–48 and 49. For a recent scientific perspective see, Michael Westaway, Jon Olley and Rainer Grün, ‘At least 17,000 years of coexistence: Modern humans and megafauna at the Willandra Lakes, south-eastern Australia’, Quaternary Science Reviews, 157 (2017), 206–211.
- 71.
Scott Mooney, Sandy Harrison, Patrick Bartlein and Janelle Stevenson, ‘The prehistory of fire in Australasia’, in Ross Bradstock, Malcolm Gill and Richard Williams (eds), Flammable Australia: Fire Regimes, Biodiversity and Ecosystems in a Changing World (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2012), 16 and 18. For a review of these hypothesises/theories see, Christopher Johnson, ‘Fire, people and ecosystem change in Pleistocene Australia’, Australian Journal of Botany, 64 (2016), 643–651.
- 72.
Doug Benson, ‘Maturation periods for fire-sensitive shrub species in Hawksbury sandstone vegetation’, Cunninghamia, 1, 3 (1985), 339–349.
- 73.
Karskens, Colony, 28–29.
- 74.
David Chapman, M. Geary, Peter Roy and Bruce Thom, Coastal Evolution and Coastal Erosion in New South Wales (Sydney: Coastal Council of New South Wales, 1982), 146. In contradistinction, Etheridge and Whitelegge placed more emphasis on the impact of the wind on the vegetation cover of coastal foredunes. They claim that nutrients leeching out of shell middens in ‘native camping grounds’ would have, in different places at different times, actually contributed to vegetation growth on the dunes. ‘Aboriginal Workshops’, 237.
- 75.
West, ‘Old and new Sydney’.
- 76.
Bodkin and Robertson, D’harawal, 89 and 93.
- 77.
Keith Willey cited in John Ogden, Saltwater People of the Fatal Shore: Sydney’s Southern Beaches (Avalon Beach, New South Wales: cyclops press, 2012), 19.
- 78.
Gammage, The Biggest Estate, 2.
- 79.
Karskens lists several reasons including a dumping ground for convicts, a maritime base to reach into the Pacific, to block the ambitions of French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese rivals, and to secure natural resources. Colony, 63.
- 80.
Karskens, Colony, 65–68 and 175–6.
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Booth, D. (2021). Eora and Bondi Country. In: Bondi Beach. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3899-2_4
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