Dispossession is a legitimate experience

Given that so much of the Darug's claim to custodianship is based on oral evidence, it seems pertinent to present a little of it here. It is not the point of this article to argue one side or the other of what seems to be less an Aboriginal historical argument but rather one deeply entangled in the contemporary politics of self-representation. Rather I propose to embrace the historian's task, which is to contextualise and explain the social context of any period under discussion, upon which basis non-specialists may then form their own judgements. Needless to say, the European colonisers' persecution of Aboriginal people was not directed at the Darug alone. I do not seek here to represent the historical context of only those who, like the Darug, demand recognition as Sydney's Indigenous custodians. Aboriginal people from the bush who came to the inner city were treated as harshly if they bore obvious Aboriginal features. The Redfern race riots of the 1970s, in which of course some Sydney traditional custodians also took part, revealed that police brutality and injustice, encouraged by the state government, could be worse again than the casual but bitter hurts endured daily at Parramatta or the Hawkesbury half a century earlier. In presenting the context in which this cultural loss occurred, I shall advance very many instances, drawn from research by the team producing the website historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au, that will outline some of the reasons why Aboriginal people in Sydney had very good reason not necessarily to extinguish their identity, but to take it 'underground'. Indigenous descent sometimes became a secret shared only by the immediate family or Aboriginal neighbours.