Life is really packed on this study abroad trip. These past 10 days have been a whirlwind
adventure and I’m left stunned at all we have done. Kate and I are both on the same Australia
trip and she has done a good job at giving an overview of everything so I am
going to go more in depth about our tour of The Rocks.
The Rocks is an area of town overlooking Circular Quay
(pronounced ‘key’). A normal tour would have shown you the Sydney Bridge, the
Sydney Opera House, the old colonial buildings, and maybe an old pub or
two. However, we did not take a normal
tour, instead our program coordinator got us a tour given from an aboriginal
perspective. It was amazing. The Indigenous Australians were treated
horribly since colonization started (but I’m going to let you look that up on
your own time to save the more squeamish readers). We learned a lot during this tour. The guide taught us about local edible
plants, some of the ways the tribes interacted, how they used to fish, and the
history of the area. One of our stops is
the last place left you can see the natural shoreline. Everywhere else is covered with docks, but a
small patch underneath a building still remains.
The biggest lesson is probably how much Europeans could
interfere with local culture and the environment just by not knowing the full
extent of what they were looking at. Aboriginal
Australians have been on the continent for 65,000-80,000 years. Some of the tribes that visited the coast
would create huge middens, piles of shells, from the shellfish they ate. On the top, they would leave a stack of
shells showing what kind(s) of shellfish they ate while they were there. When the next group came along, they saw what
kind of shellfish were eaten the last time and they would find a different
species to eat to prevent overfishing of any one species. Simple, yes, but it worked well for thousands
of years. When the British came to
colonize, they dug up the middens to use in the mortar for their buildings –
destroying the record. They also heavily overfished causing the local
extinction of species including the mud oyster.
Despite the poor treatment and many changes to the land, the
cultures of Aboriginal Australians are still alive and practiced. Many of our tours in Sydney have started with
an acknowledgement that the land we are on is the home of the Gadigal people of
the Eora Nation. Something we can learn
from back in North America.
Questions? Feel free to email me at ameliaberle@lclark.edu