Surviving the early colony (1788–1820s)

Timing is everything. When Lieutenant Cook sailed into Botany Bay in 1770, followed eighteen years later by Governor Phillip and the First Fleet, they gave the rest of the world its first glimpses of Sydney's Aboriginal people. They described and drew settlements of bark huts with oysters cooking on fires at their entrance; women fishing with hook and line in bark canoes; men poised on the rocky shore with pronged fishing spears. Though they had never seen Aboriginal people before, they were certain of two things: that the history of human life on earth was only short – perhaps a few thousand years, and that the Aboriginal way of life had not changed over that time.

They were wrong on both counts. Had they arrived ten thousand years earlier, they could not have sailed into Botany Bay – it did not yet exist. But they would still have encountered Aboriginal people, who had already been living in the Sydney region for many thousands of years. Had the First Fleet arrived just two thousand years ago, we would have none of their many illustrations of Aboriginal women fishing with burra (shell fish hooks) and line from flotillas of bark nowie (canoes). Burra had not been invented, and all of the social and economic changes that came with the rise of women's line fishing were yet to unfold.

Why is this important? Because these early historical snapshots of Aboriginal life are often regarded as depictions of real or authentic Aboriginal culture, timeless and unchanging, before it was shattered by the destructive impacts of colonialism. The idea of Aboriginal people as the world's oldest continuous culture is routinely misunderstood to mean that this way of life has never changed, and cannot change. This makes it very hard to understand how the Aboriginal hunters and fishers of coastal Sydney in the late 18th century became the mission dwellers of the late 19th, and the civil rights campaigners of the early 20th, all the while retaining a distinct Aboriginal identity. At the heart of the Aboriginal response to colonialism was a long-honed ability to adapt to change, but it has been hard to recognise with these assumptions clouding our vision. So before we see what happened to Aboriginal people in Sydney after 1788, let's turn back the clock a little further and see how Aboriginal people dealt with change before then.

A culture of change and connection

Traditional Aboriginal life is often imagined as a repeating cycle of movement, food gathering and ceremony around defined 'territories' in the landscape. Whatever kernel of reality this captures, it obscures the environmental and technological changes experienced by Aboriginal people over vast periods of time, and it ignores their complex, widespread and ever-shifting webs of connection that pushed far beyond tribal lands. It also hides the fact that Aboriginal people experienced the dramas of daily life and were players in events now long forgotten that had great importance at the time. In other words, like people everywhere, they too had history.

Aboriginal people have lived in the Sydney region for more than one thousand generations, and have witnessed the formation of the landscape Sydneysiders know today. Twenty thousand years ago, the world was in the midst of a glacial period or ice age. Though there was no ice in the Sydney region (or across most of Australia), the climate was cooler and drier, and sea levels were much lower. Today's great inlets of Sydney Harbour, Broken Bay and Port Hacking were rivers winding through deep sandstone valleys and across a vast coastal plain between six and twenty kilometres further east of the current shoreline. Botany Bay was no bay at all, but consisted of a swampy sand plain where the Cooks and Georges Rivers met, before flowing through what is now the Kurnell Peninsula. From around eighteen thousand years ago, warming global temperatures caused the sea to rise rapidly. For nearly ten thousand years it devoured the coastal plain at an average rate of two metres per year. Aboriginal people perceived this change, and though we can only guess what they made of it, the social impacts must have been profound. The flooding of the coastal plain probably forced some groups to realign or amalgamate. For hundreds of generations of Aboriginal people along the coast, constant environmental change was normal; the ground literally shifted beneath their feet.

The changing climate and landscape brought opportunity as well as challenges for Aboriginal people. By around seven thousand years ago, rising seas had flooded the sandstone river valleys and swampy sand plains of what is now coastal Sydney. Sydney Harbour, Broken Bay and Port Hacking were created, while vast quantities of sand accumulated on the new shoreline to form the Kurnell Peninsula, giving birth to Botany Bay. Many hundreds of kilometres of new coastline provided greater access to rich marine resources. Warmer sea temperatures brought creatures most likely never seen by Sydney's Aboriginal people before. The butchered remains of a six-thousand-year-old dugong found near Botany Bay show that Aboriginal people quickly learnt to exploit them. Likewise, the arrival of the dingo into Australia from south-east Asia around three thousand years ago gave Aboriginal people both a source of food and a valuable companion animal.

Until the past few thousand years, sea levels continued to fluc-tuate slightly, moving the shoreline to and fro. Large wetland com-plexes such as Towra Point and Quibray Bay on the southern shore of Botany Bay formed in the past thousand years or so, after sea levels had stabilised. The apparently timeless land that Cook and Phillip encountered as they sailed through the heads of Botany Bay in the late 18th century had only existed for a fraction of the period in which Aboriginal people had occupied Sydney. While Europeans were oblivious to these developments, Aboriginal people had always lived with change in coastal Sydney. They had forged their intimate familiarity and deep connection with its lands and waters through their accumulated ancestral experience of the diverse and shifting moods of their surroundings.

They met the challenges of a changing environment by devel-oping or adopting new technologies. Most evidence of this comes from stone implements, because those made of organic materials like bark, wood, bone and shell do not normally survive for great lengths of time buried in the soil. Even using this small sample of the Aboriginal toolkit, archaeologists have shown that many elements of the supposedly timeless way of life encountered by early Europeans in Sydney are in fact relatively recent. Until...