Eora Erotic

The Eora are the saltwater people of the Sydney coast, the clans whose country runs from Broken Bay south past Port Jackson to Botany Bay, across sandstone headlands and drowned river valleys where the fishing was good enough that nobody had to travel far. The name is partly a colonial artifact, taken from a local word meaning roughly people or from this place, which is why many descendants name the clan first: Gadigal at the head of the harbor, Wangal upriver, Cammeraygal and Wallumedegal on the north shore, Gweagal at Kurnell, Bidjigal inland. Work on the water was divided by sex. Women fished from nawi, bark canoes, using hand lines and crescent hooks ground from turban shell, and kept a small fire burning on clay and seaweed in the hull to cook the catch as they went. Men speared from the rock platforms with multi-pronged fizgigs. The shell middens they left still turn up under Sydney streets, and the figures pecked into flat sandstone, whales, fish, ancestral beings, cover the ridges north of the city. Initiation for young men included knocking out an upper front tooth, a ceremony colonists watched at Farm Cove in 1795 and recorded in detail while understanding very little of it.

The language, generally treated as the coastal dialect of Dharug within the Pama-Nyungan family, has an odd afterlife. These were the first Aboriginal people the British dealt with at length, so Sydney words are the ones that entered Australian English and then went global: dingo, wombat, boomerang, woomera, corroboree. The fullest record of it is a pair of notebooks kept by William Dawes, a marine officer with an observatory on the point that still carries his name, who learned what he could from Patyegarang, a young Gadigal woman whose half of the conversation he wrote down alongside his own. Those notebooks sat unread in London for a century and a half and are now the spine of the revival work Sydney families are doing. The rest is brutal and fast: the First Fleet anchored in 1788, smallpox went through the harbor clans in April 1789 and killed perhaps half of them, and armed resistance ran through the following decade under Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal man shot dead in 1802. Bennelong and Barangaroo, whose names now sit on the point beneath the Opera House and on a stretch of rebuilt waterfront, spent their lives working the seam between two worlds, and neither did it comfortably. Their descendants are still here, in Redfern and La Perouse and out across the suburbs, and Gadigal country is named aloud at the start of public events in the busiest downtown in Australia.