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Public Talk: Revisiting Bennelong Point
Paul Irish talks about his research on Aboriginal urban communities in Sydney and the origins of the Aborigines Protection Board on Friday 13 September 2013 at History House, 133 Macqurie Street, Sydney at 5-7pm. In the late 1870s Aboriginal people from south coast NSW and elsewhere re-entered Sydney, colonising the Government Boat Shed at Bennelong Point, and establishing…
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Aboriginal involvement with the church
Author: Anita Heiss Much of the early interest in Sydney’s Aboriginal people was as a study of ‘primitives’ in need of salvation. Catholic priests, Fathers Therry and Power baptised around 45 Aboriginal people at St Mary’s Cathedral between 1820 and 1832. The newly initiated came from Sydney, Parramatta, Richmond, Liverpool, North Shore, Five Islands, Broken…
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Acknowledgements
The Barani website has been developed by the History Team at the City of Sydney with assistance from the City’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Panel. The Barani website was first published in 2001, winning a NSW Premier’s History Award in the audiovisual category in 2002. The original website was designed by the Indigenous…
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Pauline McLeod Awards 2017
To celebrate 2017 National Reconciliation Week (27 May to 3 June), the Pauline McLeod Awards come to Bondi Pavilion, marking the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum and 25th anniversary of the Mabo decision. Presented and supported by the Eastern Region Local Government Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Forum (ERLGATSIF), this important celebration encompasses community…
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The Rushcutters Bay settlement
Author: Paul Irish Most of the harbourside bays of Sydney’s eastern suburbs contained Aboriginal settlements at different periods throughout the 19th century. Bayside reclamation works since that time have removed or covered over many of the physical traces of this occupation, but historical documents confirm Aboriginal people had a presence there. Rushcutters Bay was most…
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Richard Hill’s House
Author: Paul Irish From the 1820s to the 1920s, a red brick cottage existed on Bent Street between Macquarie and Phillip streets. The house was built by the family of Francis and Frances Cox. From the 1850s until the 1890s it was occupied by their daughter Henrietta (1812–92) and her husband Richard Hill (1810-95). Richard…
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Woolloomooloo Bay
Author: Paul Irish Woolloomooloo is the name given to the Yurong Creek valley located immediately east of Sydney Town and the Domain, which later became Sydney’s first suburb. In 1793, when Commissary General John Palmer was granted 100 acres at Woolloomooloo, extending from Woolloomooloo Bay to Oxford Street, he also acknowledged this by naming his…
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Barcom Glen
Author: Paul Irish The dense forest of houses below St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst obscures the landscape that existed there for nearly a century after the arrival of Europeans in Sydney. Rushcutters Creek, which flowed through pools and cascades down to the bay, is now buried beneath Boundary Street, and there is nothing left of the…
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Mrs Macquarie’s Chair
Author: Paul Irish In January 1988, an Aboriginal Tent Embassy was set up at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (at Mrs Macquaries Point / Yurong) in protest against the planned bicentennial celebrations of European settlement in Australia. For Aboriginal people, the arrival of the First Fleet heralded the start of a catastrophic invasion and was an event…
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Call for Nominations – Pauline McLeod Award 2017
The Pauline McLeod Awards celebrate and give recognition to community members who are “silent achievers” who work diligently in promoting Reconciliation through selfless acts. Nominations can be made in the Youth Award category (12 – 24), or the Open category. Nominees can be Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, or non-Indigenous. Nominees must either live, work…
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Tinker’s Well
Author: Paul Irish and Tamika Goward All people depend on fresh water to live, and so it is usually the case that reliable sources of water known to Aboriginal people were later used by Europeans. The most permanent of these sources in Sydney were creeks like the Tank Stream, and a number of springs, where…
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St Mary’s Cathedral Hatchet
Author: Paul Irish and Tamika Goward An Aboriginal stone axe head, also called a ‘ground-edge hatchet’, was found in a road cutting behind St Mary’s Cathedral in 1876. The hatchet would have started its life as a large flat river pebble made of hard, volcanic stone which Aboriginal people collected or quarried. It would have…
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William Street
Author: Paul Irish and Tamika Goward In 1925, a stone axe was found more than five metres below the surface during construction work at the corner of William and Riley Streets in East Sydney. Almost eighty years later in 2003 the remains of an Aboriginal campsite were uncovered around the same location during archaeological excavations before…
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Wynyard Walk campsite
Author: Paul Irish and Tamika Goward During archaeological excavations associated with the construction of the Wynyard Walk pedestrian link in mid-2014, a small Aboriginal campsite was located. The campsite consisted of several Aboriginal stone artefacts located in natural soil underneath layers of European occupation. The Wynyard Walk campsite was located on the ridge between Cockle Bay…
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Yurong Cave and Yurong Midden
Author: Paul Irish and Tamika Goward Yurong Point is known today as the site of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, a seat carved from stone in the 1810s so Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s wife Elizabeth could enjoy the view of the harbour. It has remained a popular place ever since, but visitors follow in much more ancient footsteps.…
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NAIDOC 2015: New archaeological sites on Barani
We all Stand on Sacred Ground: Learn, Respect and Celebrate To celebrate NAIDOC Week 2015, we are launching a series of 19 essays on Barani featuring a diverse collection Sydney’s Aboriginal archaeological sites. Archaeologists Paul Irish and Tamika Goward provide fascinating insight into how these sites were uncovered and shed light on how the city’s original inhabitants lived. See…
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This is where they travelled
An exhibition and walking tour called This is Where They Travelled: Historical Aboriginal Lives in Sydney will be held during NAIDOC Week 2016. This project was put together by historian Paul Irish and a team of researchers from the La Perouse Aboriginal community as part of a NSW History Fellowship awarded in 2015. The exhibition profiles the lives…
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Aborigines Protection Board Office
Author: Paul Irish An unassuming terrace house once located at the back of the State Library of NSW was home to the Aborigines Protection Board (APB) at the peak of its brutal intrusions into the lives of Aboriginal people from 1916 to 1935. In 1883, the NSW Government formed the board to oversee the distribution…
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Artspace Gallery, Surry Hills
Author: Paul Irish During the 1970s, the Australian art world and the broader public became aware of the contemporary practice of painting and other artistic expressions of traditional Aboriginal culture, particularly among the desert artists of central Australia. Drawing on the pervasive colonial view that ‘real’ Aboriginal culture is unchanging, this contemporary art was often…
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Darlinghurst Gaol
Author: Paul Irish Darlinghurst Gaol began construction in 1822 and was opened in 1841 to replace the ageing and overcrowded Sydney Gaol on George Street near Circular Quay. It took 50 years to complete, with new buildings being added to accommodate the increasing population over the following decades. Aboriginal people were among the many prisoners…
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Speakers’ Corner at The Domain
Author: Paul Irish Speakers’ Corner was established in the eastern end of The Domain near the Art Gallery of NSW in 1878. Aboriginal speakers were active there from the late 1930s, including civil rights campaigners such as Jack Patten, Tom Foster, Pearl Gibbs and William (Bill) Ferguson. Pearl Gibbs of the Aborigines Progressive Association later recalled…
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St Mary’s Cathedral
Author: Paul Irish When Australia’s first two Catholic priests arrived in Sydney in 1820, many Aboriginal people around Sydney had already been exposed to the ideas of the Christian religion. One of the priests, Father John Joseph Therry, quickly got to know Aboriginal people around the Sydney region. At this time there was no Catholic…
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Aboriginal Paddington
Aboriginal people have watched the ancient landscape of Sydney and Paddington evolve over thousands of years and generations. The rich archaeological and historical record of the harbour allows us to recreate something of how Aboriginal people used Kogerah – as they called Rushcutters Bay – and its Paddington hinterland in the centuries before Europeans arrived.…
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Blackwattle Creek
Author: Paul Irish and Tamika Goward Blackwattle Creek was originally a tidal watercourse that flowed from swampy lands that are now within the grounds of the University of Sydney. The creek flowed from this swamp through a valley thick with wattle trees and then drained into Blackwattle swamp, at the head of Blackwattle Bay around…
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Tank Stream Sydney
Author: Paul Irish and Tamika Goward Central Sydney is built in the Tank Stream valley. The Tank Stream now runs underneath the city, but its fresh water was one of the main reasons why Europeans set up camp in Sydney Cove in 1788. The stream drained swampy areas that existed around what is now Hyde…
