Anyone who watches the sky at Sydney's La Perouse on Sundays is bound to see a boomerang thrown by Laddie Timbery. And if you stand around long enough, Laddie is sure to tell you his family has been throwing boomerangs on the grass mound known as the Loop for "174 years, six months and five days, brother. A long, long time".
The Timberys have indeed been around Botany Bay for a long, long time. Laddie's ancestor, Arrigo Timbery, is featured in sketches penned by a sailor aboard the ship of the Frenchman, La Perouse. The area known as 'La Pa' is named after the captain, but before the coming of white men Laddie's folks knew it as Gurriwal.
Laddie has plenty of stories about those times, especially about the old folks who paddled out to see "Jimmy Cook" when he landed in 1770. In fact, he likes nothing better than to "yarn up" to tourists at the Loop about Jimmy Cook, La Pa, and growing up on the mission where he was born in 1941.
People often talk of Sydney Aboriginal culture as if it lives quaintly in the past. But, as Laddie will tell you, it's alive and strong! There are more than 5,000 registered Aboriginal sites in the Sydney area. They include rock engravings, burial sites, caves and rock overhangs, axe-grinding grooves, fish traps, waterholes and wells. Several groups of Aboriginal people offer guided tours of their areas.
You'll find more of Laddie's mob over at Yarra House, headquarters of the La Perouse Community. There you can see native bush foods and plants, and learn how they were used to guide hunting and fishing in the area according to flowering or seeding cycles.
Dallas Dodd and Margaret Mhuragun Campbell can reveal some fascinating history along Sydney's shores. They are co-owners of Sydney Aboriginal Discoveries, which works closely with elders of the local Aboriginal communities to provide guided tours of Sydney Harbour and its foreshores. You can learn how to find edible treats such as lilly pilly berries, the pineapple-like Gymea lily, waterlilies, native sarsaparilla and the myriad types of seafood that have sustained Sydney tribes for thousands of years.
You can learn more about bush food and medicine at Bradley's Head at Mosman, where guided tours show how local people treated ailments, insect bites and snakebites with bush remedies.
Most of the city's national parks offer guided Aboriginal culture walks. The Royal National Park alone has more than 200 Aboriginal sites.
Bundeena's Jibbon Beach has engravings of kangaroos, mystical figures with six fingers, stingrays, fish, huge whales and jellyfish.
Botany Bay National Park offers dances, bush-tucker tours and Dreamtime stories. West Head in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park is a spiritually significant area with a huge and diverse range of sites, from painted figures of lovers, to depictions of emus, kangaroos, platypuses, fishes and birds. The Manly Walk to the Spit Bridge has middens - mounds created by the remains of campfire meals over thousands of years -and some protected engravings. In North Manly, the Quarantine Station also offers guided tours to the carving and engraving sites.
Recently opened in the Royal Botanic Gardens is the Cadi Jam Ora garden honouring the tribe that occupied Sydney at the arrival of the First Fleet. Created in conjunction with local land councils and elders, the garden includes a 50-metre-long 'storyline' telling history from invasion to the stolen generations and survival of the Cadigal people. The depth of Aboriginal culture even reaches the stars. At the Sydney Observatory, the continuous exhibition By the Light of the Southern Stars includes a section called Cadi Eora Birrung: Under the Sydney Stars, which offers an Aboriginal perspective on astronomy.
Add to that the dozens of art galleries around the city, as well as performing arts groups such as the internationally acclaimed Bangarra Dance Theatre, and you begin to appreciate the scale of Sydney's Aboriginal culture. There is no better way to understand the power of a continent like Australia than living it and feeling it through Aboriginal people.
You'll find plenty of Aboriginal art in The Rocks, where you can also buyAboriginal tools of trade such as boomerangs. This also means you don't have to leave the city to get some cultural experience.
Tanya, Sydney
4WD
