our community.
Dharug Peoples acknowledge our connectedness to Kuringgai to the northeast around Broken Bay, Darkinjung to the north, Wiradjuri to the west on the western fringe of the Blue Mountains, Gandangara to the southwest in the Southern Highlands and Dharawal (Tharawal) to the southeast in the Illawarra area. These connections are attributed to oral testimony, experiences of place and stories.
These are all handed down as intergenerational knowledges.
What is a healthy community?
As a healthy community we promote cultural protocols, being inclusiveness, sharing and engaging with each other as good cultural practices. We believe good cultural protocols include being humble, honest and striving for the best for all, rather than working alone for individual gain. Inclusiveness means engaging regularly within your community to participate and or help each other. We are helping each other to develop confidence, good health and ways to help others to be heard.
We all have a voice as significant peoples representing our ancestors. As such we consult with our community to share responsibilities, we are regularly checking in with each other to acknowledge the steps of our Mentors, Elders and friends. Sharing responsibilities is particularly important when we are working with non-Aboriginal peoples. We each hold certain knowledges, this is the way culture works – rather than being an expert at something, we come together to share as Law/lore.
We have many clan names and as a community we aim to promote connectedness between these clans as families. Division is a colonial way of life whereas ours is a Country of Community resources which has its roots in pathways of connectedness.
When we think about community connectedness it becomes clear that our country was divided when early colonial explorers, surveyors and botanists employed by the English Crown. These people created divisional maps, grids across our Country (as Crown lands). While they were doing this, they were incorporating our paths along and between rivers.
These maps became important early colonial records and are seen as formal documents. They are often referred to as being more accurate than our intergenerational knowledges. This is problematic because while we accept archives can be useful for First Peoples reclaiming significant sites, as well as recording family lines through institutional records, photographic images, paintings and word lists, colonial archives often misappropriate our Ancestor’s values and the meanings they were trying to confer as their oral narratives.
Colonial archives do not always align with our experiences of Country. For example, Norman Tindale used the word Eora to describe “hordes” of people as a Nation; and in the same document David Collins (1798-1802) is sited as giving Eora the meaning as “black men.”
Many peoples in our community find this confusing because to us Eora, otherwise spelt Iora, Iyora and Yura, is known to mean people. If we are to say there is an “Eora Nation,” we are essentially saying “people-nation.”
One of the main tasks we face as a Dharug Yura, a community of Peoples of the Sydney Basin from the Mountains to the sea, from fresh-water to brackish-water and salt-water, is to help correct colonial records and Eurocentric histography propagated in schools, workplaces, and a wider schema of corporations, institutions, throughout general society. We need national and global allies to help us honour our old ones. Good allies understand that as Dharug Yura need to continue to practice our intergenerational traditions. Our methods for honouring our language through ceremonies, yarning, songs, dances, making tools, art, possum cloaks and more, helps us to maintain our custodial responsibilities – igniting our Songlines embedded as a living cultural continuity.
To clarify our continuity of community, our skills, cultural rules and ceremony are experienced as relational knowledges and traditions and are demonstrated in our community and corporate organisations and at our culture camps. We are connecting through yarning as both Dharug and other languages in our everyday lives, during projects, consultations, public art, dance rites and working hard to educate the wider community for the betterment of all.
We take humble pride in our ability to nuture Ngurra as, Yanama Budyari Gumada (walking with good spirit).
Dharug Peoples culture in context to Australian colonisation.
As a colonial context, Dharug Yura are a Peoples heavily impacted by colonisation. We have experienced intergenerational trauma and tragically, this is a common concern for many First Peoples as individuals and communities. Our old ones survived “first contact” otherwise known as “early impact” within a broader schema of colonisation through this continent re-named Australia. During the period of early colonial European settlement (approximately 1770 to 1850) our cultural paths became increasingly important to the colonisers. Many of today roads throughout the Sydney basin were originally Dharug paths connecting our rivers and waterholes. If your require western evidence, simply look to archives of early colonial explorers and botanists who used our people as guides to find their way from the coast to the north and south and westwards throughout Dharug regions. They called our fresh ubandant land and water by new names including Port Jackson and Botany Bay. They called our Durrubbin the Hawkesbury and Nepean Rivers and called our beautiful western plains the interior or Cowpastures, the Blue Mountains and Southern Highlands.
From the time when James Cook landed a ship named Endeavour on the shores of Gweagal Ngurra (renamed Kurnell, on the southern banks of Botany Bay) our Ancestors living alongside saltwater and river areas were impacted by displacement, disease and Frontier Wars. At the time of early impact Dharug peoples had cultivated and cared-as-Country for more than 50,000 years. A western scientific record of human presence at Lake Mungo dates from about 50,000 years ago.
Along with early colonisation came historic mythmaking about Dharug Peoples.
We strongly discourage the concept of “hunter-gatherer” because this term is used to label First Peoples as being unable to use their minds and intellect to develop and care for Country. We find the hunter-gather myth goes hand in hand with the concept of Terra Nullius, meaning a “land that is deemed unoccupied or uninhabited.” Both of these terms were used by the Crown for legal purposes, to claim our Country for their commercial gain.
Early colonisation along our coasts and river systems destroyed our farming practices including our fishing and established crops of midjini (yam daisy). Access to lands for Lore and seasonal herding was prevented by Land Grants, fences and English guns. Our crops were dug up and usurped by colonial farming. Our old one’s knowledges that supported healthy gestation of Indigenous plants, lands nurtured and prepared for growing and harvesting, burning practices for maintaining bushlands at specific times, were largely ignored in favour of European methods for farming crops and livestock. Nevertheless, we continue to argue for indigenous methods including bush fire control and more, and we will continue to uphold knowledges and work towards helping governments to repair their mismanagement of our lands.
When the English colony was being established in Sydney many of our ancestors married European convicts and so called ‘settlers’ by choice or by force. These intercultural marriages as well as the ‘White Australia policy’ (formally known as the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901) has led to many Dharug Yura being fair skinned in appearance. This doesn’t mean we don’t have our culture. In a contemporary context, our culture is alive and strong. On the contrary, we uphold our Ancestors complex methods for land care and sustainability. Land, waters and species are cared for according to the seasons and as holistic connectedness.
We are living in a modern world and facing new challenges to ensure our culture is recognised. Our material culture in the form of objects and items of value were once stolen as desirable art for museum or private collections. As such, our repatriation and respect for our sovereignty and self-determination are vital. We honour our Ancestors skills by continuing to produce practical tools, weavings, animal skin cloaks and creative arts. Ours is a bloodline of intergenerational knowledges, ancestral strength, resilience and resourcefulness prior, during and throughout colonisation to today.
We have overcome many challenges and are still being forced to justify our presence as Dharug of the Sydney basin. We will continue to present our knowledges and solid values and healthy subsistence’s of Law / Lore. We will continue to hold regular cultural gatherings where we come together to connect and share our cultural protocols, stories and songs. We will continue to work in collaboration with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, other government organisations and private enterprises, Councils, Universities and we will continue to produce academic thesis and publications. By doing these activities on a regular basis we hope to reveal the importance of consulting with Dharug peoples as a first step for further progress, which seems inevitable. Holding respect for each other and building bridges may eventually turn the colonial clock towards Country, always the optimist!
Venessa Possum, on behalf of DNAC, 21 October 2020.