Author and Macquarie University lecturer Jim Kohen spoke to us back in May, attracting a capacity crowd to the Maiden Theatre. Jim was particularly generous with his time; meeting us again a few weeks later to lead a tour of Mitchell Park, a place abounding in reminders of Aboriginal interactions with the land.

Jim draws on his knowledge of ecology, history, and languages, combined with insights from friends and associates of Aboriginal descent, to piece together a picture of everyday life and ecological interactions.

Part of the problem with interpreting Aboriginal history is the devastation caused when smallpox ravaged the indigenous population 1789. It is estimated that between 50 and 90% of the population of south east Australia died within three years of European settlement, long before Europeans even reached most of the area. For example, when Europeans first ventured west of Parramatta, the expedition included two coastal Aboriginal guides. Around Castle Hill, when asked who lived there, the guides replied that it use to be the Bidigal but they were all dead from smallpox.

A population loss of this magnitude would also have meant the loss of 50 to 90% of the cultural activity, such as the hunting of certain animals and the burning of the bush, and resulted in a dramatic change in the way Aboriginal people interacted with the environment. Of course there would have been a massive impact on the social structure.

Other difficulties come from cross cultural misunderstandings. Jim found a particularly interesting example when checking the writings of George Thornton, protector of Aborigines in the 1880's. They include references to two groups, the Bidgimangora and the Bulladeersyallaway. The names didn't seem to make sense until Jim realised they were Creoles, made up of words borrowed from different languages. Bulla is Darug for two, deers is a corruption of days, yalla is Darug for walk, and away is English. So they were the people who lived two days walk away. The Bidgimangora are people from the flat country. Bidgi means flat in Darug, man is the English word and ora means a place or country.

Such misunderstandings do not only apply to the names of places and people but also to the perception of culture. Europeans have often got the wrong impression - it continues !

Who were the Aboriginal People of Sydney?
The largest group of Aboriginal people in the Sydney region were the Darug, who lived from the coast to the Blue Mountains. Since Darug was not traditionally a written language there is some confusion about the correct spelling. Hence: Daruk, for the land Council, Dharug for the National Park (which isn't actually in Darug territory) and Dharruk the suburb. Jim prefers Darug because that's the way the descendants spell it.

Darug is actually the word for yam. Yams - Dioscorea and others - were an important element in the group's diet. They were particularly common on the flood plain of the Hawkesbury-Nepean river system - and that is why there were so many problems in the 1790's, when Europeans started clearing the riverflats and wiping out the yam beds to plant their crops.

The Darug were a group who spoke a common language, but within that there were three or more different dialect groups. The coastal Darug people have become to be referred to as the Eora. This however illustrates another of those cross cultural misunderstandings. An early European researcher, wanting to record the names of the different Aboriginal groups, asked the coastal people who they were. When they replied "eora" he noted that they were the Eora tribe. Eora, in fact, is the Darug word for "this place" so what they really told him was something like "we're from round here."

A second major group in Sydney were the Kuringgai who lived from north of Port Jackson to Broken Bay. Kuringgai is derived from Koori (the same word which many east coast Aboriginal prefer to call themselves) and gai which is the possessive suffix. So it means belonging to the people. We don't really know how they perceived themselves.

A third group were the Dharawal in the South, whose country extended at least down to Wollongong and probably as far as Nowra.

Aboriginal people in Sydney were basically divided into clans of around 50 to 60 people. It was the clan which was the important landowning and landusing group.

Some of the clan names are familiar, as in the Burramattagal from Parramatta. Some refer to animals or locations: the Boorooberongal - meaning people who belonged to the Kangaroos - were from out Richmond way, the Bidgigal were the people from the flat country, the Toongagal were people from the woods, and the Mulgoa were the black swan people from along the Nepean. The name Cannalgal for the North Head people is a revealing one: canna means fire, so they must have been renowned for their tendency to burn their environment. It suggests that not every clan was so inclined.

Different groups had different economies depending on where they lived. Those on the coast primarily exploited coastal resources, they caught fish and gathered shellfish. There were differences on a regional scale too: it is possible to look at a painting of an Aboriginal man from the early 1800s and tell by his hairstyle, scars and body painting if he is a Kuringgai man from north of the harbour, Darug man or a Dharawal man from the south coast.

The Sydney people had contacts up and down the coast. For example, if a whale was beached around Sydney, people from Newcastle and Wollongong would be invited to feed on it. The sharing of an abundant resource was part of Aboriginal cultural and spiritual belief.

How did the Darug see animals and plants?
The Darug word for food is Burra, as in burrawang. Plant foods were traditionally divided into three categories: (1) wigi - fruits such as lillypilly, exocarpus, figs, native grapes, and burrawang; (2) watangal - nectar from banksias, melaleucas and waratahs, which were sucked directly or made into a sweet drink called bool, and (3) darug, which refers to underground things that you dig up to eat such as roots and tubers including yams.

They also recognised four different groups of food animals: (1) goalong for animals such as wallabies, kangaroos and possums; (2) can, the snakes and lizards; (3) binyang, the birds, and (4) mogra, the fish.

Conservation measures
The Aboriginal people had lots of ways of ensuring that their resources continued to be abundant, such as:

• breaking off and replanting part of yams that had been harvested so that they would regenerate,
• discarding seeds around shell middens in coastal areas so that they would regenerate around that site,
• the custom of not collecting some fruits once they had fallen to the ground, (these were referred to as mirriburra, which as translates as dog food - only dogs were allowed to eat them.) such a practice would help ensure that there were seeds left over to produce new plants,
• totemism can also be seen as a conservation measure; people are assigned totemic animals which they do not hunt. Among the Darug were totems such as possums, kangaroos, eels, and swans, so if a kangaroo person is out hunting and he sees a kangaroo it gets to hop away. (Of course there is much more to it than this but Jim felt it was too complex to explain fully and not appropriate for him as a white person to attempt to do).

What sort of artefacts and signs might bush regenerators expect to come across?
We should know how to recognise possible finds. Jim suggests asking local Aboriginal people what they know about the areas we are working in. There are a number of Local Land Councils and Tribal Councils in the greater Sydney area.

We might come across caves and rock shelter sites, open surface scatters of stone artefacts, shell middens, paintings, engravings, initiation grounds, carved trees, canoe trees, burials, fish traps, and stone quarries. Artifacts like edge ground axes still turn up sometimes. Jim says if you do find one have a look at the tree you find it under. Axes were used for cutting toe holes in trees or for prizing bark off to make shields or canoes. There are still examples of trees bearing the scars - culturally modified trees, or CMT's to the initiated. Only last year, Jim was contacted by one of his students who thought he had found a canoe tree, near the Parramatta River. He went out to have a look and there were actually seven - overgrown and very old but still there.

Different kinds of artifacts found on Aboriginal sites reflect different kinds of activities and interestingly, they change over time. Aboriginal culture was a dynamic one and this is reflected in the way that stone artifacts come and go in the archaeological record.

A good example are the small flaked stone blades called Bondi points, (so called because they were first found at Bondi). They were common from about 3,500 until 1,500 years ago, then they drop out of the tool kit and stone axes become more common. This shows that people were not always eating the same things and exploiting the same resources. There was seasonal variation and also long term variation as resources became over exploited and/or Aboriginal populations changed.

Its worth remembering that not all important cultural sites date from pre European settlement. There are missions and reserves such as Sackville, La Perouse, Deep Creek and Sandy Point; and massacre sites such as the one near Douglas Park near Appin. The site of the original Native Institution at Blacktown is a notable example - where the practice of removing children from their families first started, back in the time of Governor Macquarie.

What about fire?
Jim admitted that it is one of his favourite topics. He points out that Aboriginal people didn't go around perpetually setting fire to things - they burned in a controlled and managed way with particular goals in mind.

A quote form 1833 gives us some insight: the author describes a journey up Berowra Creek where he met a group of Aborigines "they had set the grass on fire, which was spreading up the mountain with incredible rapidity, running up the highest tree in a moment, the weather had been lowering all day and some slight showers had fallen". This describes burning in conditions which are going to prevent a wildfire from developing - burning with a knowledge of the environment. How does it relate to bush regen? According to the classic view of succession "following a disturbance several assemblages of species progressively occupy a site, each giving way to its successor until a community finally develops which is able to reproduce its self indefinitely". However, if you set fire to the environment you are stopping that process and instead continuing a particular set of plants. The make up of the community will depend on the frequency and nature of the fires.

Excluding fire and expecting a wonderfully diverse vegetation association just doesn't work. Studies in South Australia and Western Australia have demonstrated a 50% reduction in plant species diversity for every 50 years without fire.

So how should we be using fire - how did Aboriginal people use it? They didn't "burn the crap" out of everything all the time as popular perception might have it. They were burning for particular purposes.

• Some areas needed protection from fire. They wouldn't have burned the rainforest or wet sclerophyll because that's where they were getting their figs and lillypillys from. But they would probably have burned fire breaks around such areas - as Aboriginal people still do in the Northern Territory.
• They burned to increase the availability of food resources. If you burn an area that has burrawangs in it you increase the productivity about three fold
• If you burn an area regularly you will lose shrubby species like Bursaria and start to promote a grassy understorey which is attractive to herbivores. Studies have shown that 12 months after a fire there is a dramatic increase in the number of kangaroos and wallabies, until about 5 of 6 years later when numbers start to stabilise. The grassy understorey will contain food plants such as orchids and lilies.
• There would have burned to make travel easier. Traditional pathways would have followed ridge tops - and those areas are likely to have had a greater fire frequency.
• They burned to hunt large animals. Kangaroo hunts took place, particularly in the grasslands to the south west of Sydney. A number of clans would come together. 50 or 60 hunters would form a large circle light a fire then drive the kangaroos past a particular point so they could spear them.
• Fire was also used to hunt arboreal game such as possums and gliders. People would set fire to a hollow in the base of a tree and smoke the possum out.
• Burning would have ensured a good supply of tree hollows for animals such as possums gliders and goannas.

Today's land manager burns the bush for different reasons, such as to prevent wildfire and protect lives and property.

Did Aboriginal burning cause any environmental damage? Its possible that it accelerated erosion rates in sclerophyll forest on the east coast. Regular intense fires would have left the soil surface vulnerable to erosion during rain. Interestingly, the kind of environments you see in the McDonald Valley and along the Colo River, with broad valley floors where sediments have been deposited, only formed within the last few thousand years. Jim suggests that the increased sediment loads may be the result of an increase in Aboriginal burning in the corresponding period. This highlights one of the difficulties we have in reconstruction Aboriginal fire regimes. We have practically no evidence that the way they were burning in 1788 was the same ways as they were burning 50 years before or 1000 years or 10,000 years before. Of course there is a lot more to the story, and Jim has published two books in which these issues are further explored.

• The Darug and Their Neighbours, The Traditional Owners of the Sydney Region Darug Link in Association with Blacktown and District Historical Society 1993
• Aboriginal Environmental Impacts UNSW Press 1995.

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