What lies beneath - Page 2

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by James Woodford

In her book Sydney's Aboriginal Past (UNSW Press, 2002), Attenbrow says the high end of the estimates for the region's pre-European population is eight thousand people. ‘Although estimates can be made based on historical descriptions and archaeological evidence, we shall never know the actual size of the population that lived in the Sydney region when the British arrived,' she says.

By all accounts, those who called the harbour home led a rich cultural life based on an almost endless supply of seafood, supplemented by terrestrial animals like kangaroos. While it is amazing that material is vaulted away under skyscrapers, what is even more incredible is that Sydneysiders do not have to go very far from George Street to find places where Weerong is not under the carpet but rather on view for anyone to see.

There is no need to go to Kakadu to see spectacular cave paintings – in fact, although most Sydneysiders don't realise it, their closest rock art is probably within a few hundred metres of their front door. There are close to 4,500 registered Aboriginal sites in Sydney and some of these are masterworks of exquisite beauty. There are virtually no other major international cities riddled with as much prehistory as Sydney. There are middens, hand stencils, stone tool scatters, trees whose trunks have been scarred by the removal of bark for the construction of canoes and coolamons, burial sites and, most famously, an ever-growing body of engraving sites. ‘Sydney is the rock art capital of the world,' Attenbrow says.

IT IS A RECENT WEEKDAY lunchtime in Sydney and I am close to the shores of the harbour with Val Attenbrow. We are perched on a giant weathered log off to one side of the grass-covered spit that joins Berry Island with mainland Sydney. Berry Island is only a few minutes from the high-rises of North Sydney, and in the water at our backs is the great bulk of the crude oil freighter Leonis, disgorging its load.

My head is spinning at what Attenbrow has just shown me: a rock engraving of an ancestral spirit figure and grinding grooves made by the North Shore's original inhabitants, the Cammeraygal people.

The grinding grooves were formed by these people sharpening stone axes in this place in the millennia before Governor Phillip arrived. A little circular waterhole, which would have been used to lubricate the grooves, is there and filled with clear but tannin-stained water. The enormous spirit figure was created with motivations that will never be fully understood. Yet, considering the engraving is the size of a mini-bus and draped over an entire rock platform, its significance was probably as mind-blowing as the fact that it has survived at all. And who knows what the half-boomerang at the foot of the figure could possibly signify?

How is it that, on the edge of one of the most modern cities in the world, there is an unspoilt place where potent symbols of Australia's Stone Age survive so proudly and perfectly?

As all these thoughts rush through my mind, a strange gathering begins quickly before our eyes – a group of nine men and women appears, apparently out of nowhere. They stroll purposefully towards a neatly-mowed patch of grass. They roll out their mats and begin their yoga asanas. We joke that the group is doing ‘midden yoga'.

Before we sat on the log, Attenbrow and I had examined the same spot where the contortions were now taking place and studied some of the thousands, probably millions, of bleached and leached shells – mostly oysters – grudgingly being yielded by the earth. There is a huge shell midden there, the remains of hundreds and maybe thousands of years of feasting. It is a surreal moment but for me it captures the disconnect that exists between Sydneysiders and the truth of the city's past. Almost certainly, none of the yoga devotees would have a clue about what was underneath their mats. Most Sydneysiders are aware that the city is overlaid on an Aboriginal history but are oblivious to its extent. Only a very small handful see the city through the prism of past ownership, but those lucky few see prehistory almost everywhere they look.

Sydneysiders have their equivalent of the Egyptian pyramids or the Lascaux Caves, only we don't look or understand what we are seeing when we do.

And the prehistory is in some very strange places in very odd contexts.

At Balls Head, near HMAS Waterhen in North Sydney, is one of the best-preserved rock engravings in the city. It is just three or four metres outside the front door of an environmental and earth sciences building and bounded on one side by a carpark. As Attenbrow and I arrive at the site, we can hear the hum of the city and the thump of jackhammers nearby. Again the engraving is remarkable – a whale with a man inside it. The artwork is perfectly clear and undamaged by graffiti.

Some decades ago, a decision was made to fence off the engraving and holes were augured into the sandstone slab for posts and a framing of four-by-four timber, painted white. Time travelling with the engraving is a small triangle of remnant vegetation, Old Man Banksias and Lomandra. There is a sense that this little outcrop of rugged Sydney sandstone, with its unkempt native plants, has only survived because no one could build a house, a road or a lawn on it. To me it looks like a last little island of wild Sydney surrounded by the rising tide of city sprawl. What do the people in the building right next to the artwork think each morning when they come to work? What would the original artist think of the new context of their whale engraving? Again, though, the biggest question is what this giant picture of a whale really meant. What a story it must have been, this tale of a whale that swallowed a man! Where else in the world would there be an original ancient piece of rock art where cars park just a few centimetres away? Why isn't this spot on the tourist trail like the Harbour Bridge, which is visible through the trees?

Attenbrow and I drive another few hundred metres to another site on Balls Head she wants to show me. This time we pass tourists, and then we sneak off the track, push through undergrowth, scramble down a steep slope until we come to a surprisingly clean and undamaged rock shelter. We can see the water of the harbour sparkling just in front of us, and through a light filter of trees we see a vast cargo ship, nudged by a tug just passing beneath the deck of the Harbour Bridge. Again there is a midden under our feet on the floor of the overhang. Attenbrow shows me the spot where an archaeological trench was dug and stone tools and human remains excavated – an incisor was associated with the body, possibly from a necklace. Then we turn around and look at the wall of the tiny sandstone overhang. Even in the gloom, the stencils of two small hands – either children's or a small woman's – stand out clearly. They make me gasp with surprise. I have walked in the wildest places with archaeologists to find similar rock art and here it is, a ferry blast from Circular Quay. Only the hardest of hearts could not be touched by the existence of such a statement of humanity. There before us were two hands sprayed with a sentiment that has spoken to everyone who came after those palms were pressed against the sandstone. ‘I was here, I am still here, I will be here long after you are gone.'

We walk down the slope towards the water.

The rocks in the tidal zone are covered in a stucco of oysters, and I realise that none of the things that we have found are prehistoric. They are here today and are part of the fabric of our city. Even those who never see this art subconsciously know it is there. We know this because of the strange names of our suburbs that still survive – names bestowed by these original people: Parramatta, Kirribilli, Coogee, Bondi and Maroubra.

Not only do stones and words survive, but so do the people – it is the Metropolitan Land Council which helps guide the archaeology undertaken in the CBD. Sydney is an art gallery turned inside out, where the creative spirit is literally manifest in our dirt, on our rocks and our trees. Our skyscrapers are built on foundations of stone tools, our parks are filled with rock art, we do yoga on middens, we park cars beside giant whales and little hands from long ago wave at us from stone walls. The original culture drifts over, under and through the city like a mist – acknowledged or ignored, it has not gone away. It will not go away. ♦