So many Australian place names honour murderous white men and their violent acts

Submitted by Paul Daley on Sat, 17/03/2018 - 8:00am

Long before the Dutch or British came, the land resounded with stories that charted the sky, the beasts and all the humans

From Bennelong’s place at Kissing Point I take the ferry back downriver and into the wind towards the point, now adorned with the opera house, that bears his name. It’s where the first governor, Arthur Phillip, built Bennelong a small hut in which he lived, periodically, before opting in later years for a more traditional life.

In 1788 Phillip’s fleet entered the harbour that would become the gateway to Sydney. But it was already a primordial city, replete with monuments testifying to the timeless occupation of the Gadigal and others. Peter Myers, a member of the design team for Sydney Opera House, has written of how, with the arrival of subsequent fleets, the new settlement was built atop the ancient. There was a shortage of mortar lime in the colony. The solution seemed obvious to the invaders: as glue for the new buildings of hewn timber and stone, for the seawalls and jetties, the remnants of which still abound, they used the massive oyster shell mounds that stood around the edges of the harbour. Myers has no hesitation calling these middens “shell monuments”:

There are recorded sightings of shell monuments 12 metres high along the water’s edge (… equivalent to the height of the southern podium of Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House). Can you imagine how many thousands of years of gathering and accumulation went into their making?

had significant personal experience in coming into contact with Aboriginal groups hostile to his group’s presence during his three expeditions between 1869 and 1874.

In June 1874 at Weld Springs Forrest had shot Aboriginal people himself when about ‘40 to 60 natives came’ running towards the camp, all plumed up and armed with shields and spears. These experiences would inform Forrest’s later judgments.

All the principal figures in the foreground are from original portraits; the tall figure laughing, on the left, is the chieftan or king of the Newcastle tribe, called Buriejoe – a brave, expert fellow, who has lately presented Governor Macquarie with his eldest son, to be placed in the native institution, as a proof of his confidence in British humanity.