FOUR - VOICES FROM THE BLACK

They gather in the graveyard, digital cameras clutched in sweaty eager hands as the tour guide makes his way toward them. In the distance they can hear the thrum of engines and the scream of tyres as cars race along Prospect Highway, the Great Western Highway and the Western Motorway. Like eager ants with bright shining eyes in the dark, the vehicles rush hither and thither on their night-time tasks, from who knows where to who knows what. On the hill in the cemetery they ignore such sounds, the noise of present day – they have come to listen for older voices, the whispers of the past.

“Welcome to St Bartholomew’s,” the tour guide smiles in sepulchral tones, “a church that dates back to 1841. You stand now in a cemetery containing the graves of this land’s earliest settlers. Look over there – there stands the grave of the explorer William Lawson, who first braved the unknown path across the Blue Mountains alongside Blaxland and Wentworth in 1813…”

And so it goes, as history gives way to modern myth and the tour guide speaks of a woman in white that haunts the church on the hill, a ghostly presence that causes nausea and immobility in proximity to one of the graves, temperatures that rise to hot or drop to cold in certain areas, faces that peer out of the empty church’s windows and a small boy lurking in the darkness, glimpsed only momentarily in the shadows of the night. Flashbulbs pepper the night with temporary explosions of light, illuminating the empty spaces, capturing digital images of this place of history. Later they will race home to pore over the images, drawing circles around shadowy shapes and out of focus objects, calling them faces and orbs, uploading them to Facebook so their friends can see. Shadows of the past circulated through the digital medium of the present.

But in the chaos of camera phones and selfies, drowned out by the urban legends of ghosts and demons, there are deeper sounds that are missed. Voices of a past more distant still, the deep thrumming bass beat of the earth beneath their feet. It sings a song that began between 300 and 250 million years ago, when the ocean waves gave way to river deltas and marine deposits were overlain by coals. A coastal plain formed, holding within it shales and mudstone, tuff, claystone and sandstone. The land undulated gently, a place now known as the Cumberland Plain, resting within the heart of the Sydney Basin. Back then it had no name, but it is a land with its own memories formed in deep time. When the first people trod upon it, then the naming began. They took a map, a geography, and turned it into a story.

From Faulkland Crescent Reserve you can look across the land and see. From this high place once you could see the canopy of trees stretching out to every horizon, hunters could watch for mobs of Dromaius novaehollandiae, now called emu, then called Marayong, the name that would filter from the animal to the place. Modernity now punctuates the green with the unnatural concrete shapes and great scars of black that are the criss-crossing roadways. From here they look like they could still be drawn back into the earth with the merest shrug from the heavens. For below the steel and tar, in the dirt, left dormant for millennia, lies the truth of history. In the clumps of dirt, now worn hard by time, the defining truths of not just a place, but a nation, can be unearthed.

The land here was thickly forested and crisscrossed with creeks and rivers, the life blood of the Indigenous peoples. The singing waterways were paths of life, but when the settlers came everything changed. As William Cox upgraded the colonial road system, so new areas opened to grants. Listen and you can hear their names whispered by the voices of the past, Harris, Nicholas, Fitzgerald, Barrett, Milford and McLoughlin. New names in an old land, looking to give it new names, to make its story their own.

Before they came it was a place of strange mystery, home to a wild hairy man with backward turned feet, the Gulea, along with the winged Dthuwangong and monstrous Mumuga, who produced a terrible stench from his body to overpower his prey. There was the Ghindaring, who dwelt in rocky areas, his body glowing like burning coals. There was Gurungaty, who dwelt in waterholes and ate those who did not belong in the land. There was Wallanthagang, who stunned his prey then laid them out on an ant nest to be stung. But most important was Dharamulan. He was of the time of the dreaming, when the animals of today were still human, dwelling in clouds and mountains and trees, looking down from the highest of places. Mirrirul made all things and would stand atop the tallest tree to receive the spirits of the dead when they returned at the end of their lives. Can you hear the echo of these stories? Even now in Faulkland Crescent Reserve as joggers and dog walkers race by, the voice from beneath the earth remembers the tales that were told here so many ages past. Dharamulan gave the Aboriginal people their laws here, and the Elders of each tribe passed the knowledge down, from father to son. Links in the long chain of history.

The settlers saw the same land, but looked on it with different eyes. To them it was grazing land, farming land, a new place to make their lives. It was a world to be reshaped, as the eucalypts and ironbarks were felled and crops planted in their place. The very land itself, it could be argued, cursed the newcomers with drought and tensions soon arose between the settlers and Aboriginal people as traditional hunting and gathering grounds were cleared and made ready. The dreaming animals vanished and in their place came cattle and sheep. Violence was unleashed in the years of 1814 to 1816 between the old and the new, between the need to survive and a culture of sharing.

Governor Macquarie, despite the starch and pomp indicated in images, recognised the issues caused by drought. He vacillated between benevolence and suppression with his “native charges”, and this time sided firmly with the settlers. Violent acts were carried out by settlers in Bringelly, in Appin, in the Nepean and in the Hawkesbury River areas. The clash of cultures saw Governor Macquarie order punitive expeditions to kill those Aboriginal people involved in the skirmishes with settlers. Three groups of soldiers were sent from Sydney, one to the Cowpastures, Airds and Appin. Another to Parramatta, Windsor and the Grose. Lastly, the third went to the banks of the Nepean. The Governor even had a secret weapon to help the expeditions on their way, two men named Colebee and Nurragingy, what he would think of as “friendly natives”.

Can you hear their footsteps through the bracken and underbrush, pushing forward into the hot land, cicadas singing around them as wary and eager soldiers followed close behind. It is not insignificant that on the expedition led by Colebee and Nurragingy of the Darug people, not a single Aboriginal person could be found. Perhaps you can hear their laughter, the two guides, who had carefully led the soldiers there and back again, a punitive expedition without a single bullet fired. As a reward Macquarie granted Colebee and Nurragingy thirty acres of land in 1816. They chose a location near Plumpton Ridge, a site of importance to the South Creek Tribe. In other words, they had been granted a small parcel of their own traditional land. This was the very first grant issued to the original inhabitants of this land, a part of the old extruding through into the new. Old names and new names and the land that contained them both. It became known as the ‘Black Town’, the newest name in the oldest land. Soon this ‘Black Town’ had a flourishing community of Aboriginal people living on it; the road leading to it is now Richmond Road, but was once named for this community, the ‘Black Town Road’.

More subtle than a round from a musket, or the hack of a sword, the land that had once been green had been given over to corn, wheat and bloated cows. Soon more arrivals came. Not convicts or settlers but something both newer and older and stranger by far – the missionaries. The Blacktown Native Institute was opened in 1823 by Governor Brisbane, a colonial initiative aimed at assimilating the indigenous population into the British way of life. The Institute was not the first, another having been opened by Macquarie in Parramatta in 1814 as an attempt to avoid future conflicts between the settlers and the Hawkesbury-Nepean River Aboriginal people. When the proposal arrived from missionary William Shelley, it was an opportunity the Governor could not ignore. “There is a need for education of Aboriginal youths,” Shelley argued, “in useful skills” he continued, but to whom the skills would be of use he did not specify. Parents were warned that they could not remove their children, told instead that they could assemble and meet with them once a year on the 28th of December. The school grew steadily as students were captured during punitive expeditions.

The Blacktown Native Institution operated under the direction of the Church Missionary Society with George and Martha Clarke appointed to run it. The school opened the doors of its then hastily erected huts to a grand total of fourteen pupils. More substantial buildings would be built, but the pupils busied themselves straight away by digging gardens, planting flowers and having the Clarkes provide them with religious guidance. Christianity, reading, writing and arithmetic were the orders of the day. The boys of the institute would also receive an education in agriculture while the girls would be schooled in needlework.

The Institute would eventually feature a school house which doubled as a residence, and all the necessary parts of a working farm. Water for the site was obtained from Bells Creek which ran below the Institute, the same water source utilised by their neighbours, the inhabitants of the Black Town. The Clarkes would depart in 1824, travelling on to New Zealand to spread their gospel further afield, leaving John Harper to run the Institute, but only for a short while, since 1825 saw it abandoned to closure. By then the area had changed. The Black Town filled with families whose children were in the school, mournful parents looking up the hill as their sons and daughters dressed in European clothes, planting gardens, taking lessons, learning the ways of another life, new and alien in the dry land of ironbark and eucalypt. From the top of the hill the children would look down toward the Black Town, so close yet so distant… a reminder of the world they had left behind, the distant figures of family and friends watching and waving as they learnt sewing and woodwork with the sound of cicadas singing loudly around them.

The school would reopen only to close again, changing hands many times during its run, a short sprint across a mere handful of years. Convicts moved into what had previously been an isolated area, while the children absconded from their lessons on a regular basis to re-join their loved ones on the neighbouring land grant, only a short walk away. For what was the inevitable purpose of their education at the institute? Mr Hall of the Church Missionary Society was delighted to report in October 1826 that six Aboriginal girls, originally from the Female Orphan Institution, along with three Maori children, had been educated sufficiently through the institute for them to be directed toward gainful employment as servants for himself and his family.

Built to house sixty students, by 1827 the school had but seventeen Aboriginal and five Maori pupils. Convicts and farmers joined the residents of the Black Town, settling within the surrounding area, and the external pressures disjointed the intentions of the school, fracturing it to the point that Governor Bourke finally called an end and sold the property on in 1833. By 1877 Sydney Burdekin had moved there, adding a ballroom to the existing structures. What began as a place of European education in opposition to traditional culture became a place of lavish parties, as those of import in the fledgling colony gathered to dance and laugh and drink and eat at Sydney’s house. Perhaps you can hear them now, their laughter overlaid upon the crying of children, drowned out by the sound of cicadas, then the crackling of flames. By 1924 only ashes remained as the original schoolhouse and its many additions were all claimed by fire.

There was a story among the Aboriginal people of the area that long ago they had descended from the clouds. When they died they returned there once again, but before the final ascendance into the sky you could briefly see the souls of the departed taking the shape of children once again. They would hover in the tops of trees, sitting in the branches, one last moment of connection to the Earth before they floated away once again. In the end the physical always falls away, the souls falling upward just as built structures are absorbed once again into the ever changing surface of the land, the great living story of which these are but characters upon its stage. Or are they more tattoos, scarred upon the surface of a rippling, living skin?

In 2005 the archaeologists would search for the footprints of those that had walked this way before, filtering through the disturbed soil deposits and modern rubbish for some sign of the past. They found scatters of silcrete, unworked, unused, and the modified water channel of Bells Creek and its tributary. They noted the foundations of structures long ago destroyed. All now within a park where people walked their dogs, had picnics and played games. A cricket ball sailing high in an arc across the expanse of manicured lawn as residential houses sprang up on all sides. Dirt bikes riding across the park as rubbish congeals in the drainage lines and ditches, washing down into Bells Creek where the water continues to flow. Swimming pools and driveways and letterboxes, bus stops and cars driving at speed down the tarred expanse of what was once known as the Black Town Road.

There are many tracks in the landscape, many scars that can be seen from on high. Atop the hill in Faulkland Crescent Reserve you stand upon land once used by Aboriginal people, the remnant stone tools of past occupation still scattered across the crest. These remnants, footprints of the past, are now called artefact scatters, this one known by the designation #45-5-1107. There is little poetry there, far removed from the language of the past that linked the artefacts directly to the landscape that birthed them. “You see a stone,” a contemporary Aboriginal man mutters, looking at the broken scraper tool on the ground at his feet, “you see a stone, but I see a man”. From there you might look south and glimpse the metal and wood backbone of a modern serpent, cutting the land in two halves by the vast extent of its proliferating body. It was the arrival of this beast in 1860 that changed the shape of the land. A connection point to the existing thoroughfare known as the Black Town Road, this new addition in the form of the railway line was finished at a full stop marked by the words: ‘The Black Town Road Rail Station’. Later it would simply become Blacktown Station. With its arrival the town grew and flourished, fed by the artery of arriving and departing carriages and the goods and people that flowed from within. A post office opened in 1862, a source of news and communication, a central point connected to many others across the growing country. Letters were sent, voices speaking through the written word, packed into satchels and loaded onto carriages to race along the tracks in every direction. The stories of Blacktown sent forth to fly; paper birds soaring on the back of a speeding serpent.

By 1877 there were enough inhabitants to warrant a school being built. This was no peripheral establishment for native indoctrination, but rather a public school for the many children of the area. The brick structure was designed by Sydney architect George Allen Mansfield, who envisaged a squat square within which empty minds might be filled with knowledge. Numbers would continue to grow over the years, until attendance became compulsory in 1916. Up until 1990 they still toiled at desks in the same classrooms, learning what they could of the past to prepare them for an uncertain future. Now shoppers exit Westpoint Shopping Centre (founded in 1973), descend the library steps (opened in 2005 and named for Max Webber), sip coffee and indulge in El Jennah chicken, surrounding the extant structure that crouches unnoticed in their midst. From all across the Earth they have come, settlers, immigrants, new arrivals… but aren’t we all new arrivals in a land as old as this – the latest characters within a story that has been told for ages. Frank Lowy began his business enterprises here with a shopping centre in Patrick Street. Gough Whitlam delivered his speech in Blacktown in 1972, stating: “There is one group of Australians who have been denied their basic rights to the pursuit of happiness, to liberty and indeed to life itself for 180 years – since the very time when Europeans in the New World first proclaimed those rights as inalienable for all mankind…” So many cultures stand here now, their footsteps falling upon a land whose story continues with them and through them every day. Back in the cemetery the tourists have stashed their cameras away, climbing back into their cars to make the drive back home. At the one time school, now tourist information centre, a banner flag idly shifts in the breeze as the cars slide by, brightly proclaiming “I HEART BLACKTOWN” to anyone willing to see. Do you think they heard them, those whispers of times gone by, the resonating sound of the land itself, of the many voices of history, those voices from the black, forgotten spaces between now and then? The voices will continue, even after they have gone. So many voices, so many stories, echoing through the bustling modern world that circles around and around the places of yesteryear. A living story that is nowhere near its ending.