Darug Erotic

The Darug are the people of the ground Sydney was built on. Their country is the Cumberland Plain, from the Hawkesbury River south to around Appin and west to the foot of the Blue Mountains, so most of suburban western Sydney sits on Darug land, including Parramatta, Blacktown and Penrith. They were organized in small clans, each tied to its own stretch of country, and several names survive on the map: the Burramattagal at Parramatta, the Cabrogal at Cabramatta, the Boorooberongal around Richmond. Inland clans lived on possum, kangaroo and above all the yams that grew along the Hawkesbury and Nepean riverbanks, while their saltwater relatives around the harbor, usually called Eora, fished. Whether coast and hinterland were one people or two is still argued, but linguists treat their speech as one language with two dialects.

That language, Dharug, belongs to the Yuin-Kuric branch of Pama-Nyungan, and English speakers use pieces of it daily without knowing: dingo, wombat, wallaby, waratah, woomera, corroboree and cooee all came from the Sydney language. It fell out of daily use within a few generations of 1788. What survives comes largely from the notebooks of First Fleet officer William Dawes, who learned the coastal form from a young woman named Patyegarang, and from wordlists the surveyor R. H. Mathews gathered a century later. Darug teachers have used those sources to bring the language back into western Sydney classrooms, songs and welcome speeches.

Being first in the path of the colony cost them heavily. The smallpox epidemic of 1789 killed a large share of the Aboriginal people around Sydney. Settler maize farms then took over the Hawkesbury river flats and destroyed the yam beds, and the fighting that followed lasted until 1816. Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal man, led raids on the settlements for more than a decade before he was shot in 1802. Others bargained with the new order. Maria Lock, daughter of the Boorooberongal leader Yarramundi, topped the colony's school examination in 1819 ahead of the settler children, married a convict, and petitioned successfully for land. Many Darug families trace their descent through her.

The Darug never left. Descendants live across greater Sydney, run their own corporations, look after the rock engravings, grinding grooves and scarred trees that survive between housing estates, and argue, with each other and with neighbors, over who speaks for country. The site of the Blacktown Native Institution, where Aboriginal children were once taken to be schooled away from their families, was returned to Darug hands in 2018. Spiritual life is still rooted in country and the law that comes from it, and for many families it sits alongside Christianity.