Negotiating Survival: Aborigines, settlers and environmental knowledge on Sydney's Botany Bay and Georges River (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney
Australian Historical Studies
, in addition to first-rate work by others like Jim Smith, Keith Vincent Smith and James Kohen. For this reason, I waited in some anticipation for the publication of this book. Although it doesn't quite match up to the others, it is a very welcome addition to Sydney Aboriginal historiography. Despite its comprehensive title, the book is essentially a history of only a rather narrowly defined coastal region of Sydney from La Perouse to the southern shore of Sydney Harbour, and the lower Georges River.
Early European interaction with Aboriginal hunters and gatherers on Kangaroo Island, South Australia
Aboriginal History Journal, 2011
The earlier written history of European settlement in Australia generally portrays the Aboriginal inhabitants as being at best inconsequential or at worst a hindrance to the development of a Western nation. For instance, early this century, Blacket gave his impression of the role of Aboriginal people in the early years of European settlement in South Australia by saying These children of the bush...gave the early settlers much trouble.'639582*l1 Similar opinions of South Australian history were later provided by Price and Gibbs." However, elsewhere modern scholars, such as Baker and Reynolds, are putting forward views that Aboriginal people had important roles in the setting up of the British colonies across Australia.' They demonstrate that the contribution of Aboriginal people to the colonising process has been an underestimated aspect of Australian history. Following this argument, I am concerned here with assessing the importance of Aboriginal hunter/gatherer knowledge and technology to the early European settlement of South Australia. Kangaroo Island is where the first unofficial settlements were established by European sealers, who brought with them Aboriginal people from Tasmania, and obtained others from the adjacent coastal areas of South Australia. This is an important region for the study of the early phases of European interaction with Aboriginal people. Thus, this paper is primarily a discussion of how and what European settlers absorbed from Aboriginal people and their landscape. The period focussed upon is from the early nineteenth century to just after the foundation of the Colony of South Australia in 1836. European expansion into southern Australian waters In 1791, vessels returning to England from New South Wales took word of schools of 4
Antiquity, 2014
A bark shield now in the British Museum can be identified from documentary and pictorial evidence as one collected by Captain Cook during his first voyage to Australia in 1770. Such shields often had special value to their Australian Aboriginal owners and hence might have been exchanged over considerable distances. This particular shield is known to have been collected in Kamay Botany Bay but analysis of the bark of which it is made revealed it to be of red mangrove, a tropical species found today more than 500km distant on the New South Wales north coast. It hence bears valuable testimony to the long-distance exchange networks operating in eastern Australia in the period before the disruption caused by European colonisation.
The Baudin Expedition and the Aborigines of ‘Botany Bay’
Zeitschrift für Australienstudien / Australian Studies Journal
The Baudin Expedition and the Aborigines of 'Botany Bay' Colonial Ethnography in the Era of Bonaparte Recording their entry through Sydney Heads in mid-1802, the members of the Nicolas Baudin Expedition made no mention of the Aboriginal men, women and children who must have been watching from ashore or who, according to custom, most likely rowed out in canoes to meet their ships. Neither did those aboard the Naturaliste, which arrived ahead of the Géographe, express any curiosity about whether their companions, stranded ashore after their dinghy capsized in a storm, had come into contact with the Indigenous people. 1 Their attention was elsewhere: they counted the other vessels sighted ahead in the port, searched for other discovery ships, and, on the quarter-deck, noted the distant sound of a nine-canon salute-the British colonists, they presumed, were celebrating St George's Day (Breton: 4 floreal an X [24 April 1802]). As they sailed toward the colony, the Frenchmen apparently gave little thought to the Indigenous life around them. They were preoccupied, instead, with anticipation of the comforts and company to be found ahead among their fellow Europeans in Sydney-Town.
No Fish, No House, No Melons: the earliest Aboriginal Guides in Colonial New South Wales
Aboriginal History, 2020
Aboriginal individuals – often men – who went with the colonists on their travels in colonial New South Wales performed various, often vital, roles. While this is well known, less attention has been paid to the ways in which relationships developed between the colonists and those guiding, or how these relationships were dependent on meeting the needs and desires of all involved. By teasing apart some of the earliest, shakiest beginnings of Aboriginal men travelling with and ‘guiding’ the colonists, this article suggests that guiding was negotiated from the outset – the product of intercultural dialogue and deliberation – and that it is a phenomenon that benefits from being more fully contextualised.
The mid-nineteenth-century shore-based whaling stations scattered along the western and southern Western Allstralian coasts were often at the extreme edge ofthe frontier ofEuropean settlement. This paper explores the archaeological evidence for food supply at the Cheyne Beach whaling station, northeast ofAlbany. It establishes that, despite the difficulties of supply, the occupants of the station retained a heavy reliance on sheep in preference to either salted meats or readily accessible native fauna. It is suggested that this may have been a result of dietary preference, but could also result from whaling requiring a state of constant preparedness that kept the workers in the immediate vicinity ofthe site and unable to undertake hunting or farming activities.
Does technology make a difference? Aboriginal and colonial fishing in Port Jackson, New South Wales
Archaeology in Oceania, 2012
Over 580 fish species are known for Port Jackson, site of the first British colony of New South Wales. When the British arrived in January 1788 they encountered Aboriginal people who gained a substantial part of their diet from fish. Aboriginal fishing technologies (e.g. spears, shell fishhooks and small canoes) were documented by colonial writers. The British brought metal fishhooks, seine nets and larger boats, and after AD1788 fishing was important to both Aboriginal people and colonists. Given the diversity of fish in Port Jackson, and differences between Aboriginal and colonial fishing technologies, our paper discusses archaeological and documentary evidence for the impact of technology on the types of fish caught by Aboriginal people and colonists before and after AD1788. We compare archaeological fish bones from Aboriginal sites in coastal Sydney with those from the Quadrant historical site in Broadway, Sydney, and discuss methodological challenges raised by these kinds of analyses for Sydney regional archaeology. Technology explains some fish bone assemblage variability but colonisation, cultural attitudes, commercialisation and urbanism are also important.