Gadigal – Land Acknowledgments in Australia

Wooden vessels in the Aboriginal wing of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These vessels were used to transport burning coals from one end of the rainforest to the other, preserving the fire contained in them.

After our tourist expeditions in Sydney, Australia, Dennis and I often joined the queue on Park Street in the Central Business District, waiting for the #506 bus to transport us back to our friend Marilyn’s house.   While we stood at the curb outside the Criterion Hotel, I couldn’t help noticing the main entrance to Sydney’s central metro station, directly across the street.   As passengers emerged from and descended into its open maw, I looked up at the large lettering above the station.  “Gadigal,” the sign said, and although this name sounds like a charming town in Ireland, I already knew better. 

According to Microsoft CoPilot, “The Gadigal people are the traditional custodians of the land now known as Sydney, Australia, and are part of the Eora Nation, which encompasses various clans in the Sydney region.”  In other words, the name of Sydney’s central metro station is a one-word ‘land acknowledgment.’   

What is a land acknowledgment, you ask?  Those of us who live in Seattle could not be more familiar with the term, because these days it is not possible to attend any local public event or meeting without first hearing the moderator voice words like these:

“Before beginning this (meeting/conference/opera/concert/lecture or what have you), we want to acknowledge that we are on the land of the Coast Salish people, who have hunted and fished here on the Salish Sea for many millennia.” 

Of course, the speaker always conveniently leaves out one crucial phrase which should inevitably follow:

“…until the land was forcibly removed from them by the white people who colonized them, gave them smallpox and other European diseases heretofore absent from North America, and nearly wiped out their population.”

Notwithstanding the anti-DEI policies of the current administration in Washington, D.C., it has always seemed to me that making a land acknowledgment without mentioning the genocide perpetrated on American Indians represents the height of hypocrisy.  If nothing else, it reveals a cloying complacency on the part of the speaker that, by their silence, extends to the audience members. 

Logic and compassion both suggest that, if we Seattleites are going to go all-in on land acknowledgment, we have a moral responsibility to make monetary reparations for the many local tribes who are collectively known as the Coast Salish, if not to give them back their land.  Sadly, I have never once heard a speaker add these words that the occasion demands:

“For these reasons, we are hereby granting 50% of the (ticket, registration, etc.) revenue of this event to the Muckleshoot and Duwamish peoples.”

Until I traveled to Australia, I had assumed that the tradition of voicing land acknowledgments belongs exclusively to the bleeding-heart liberals of the greater Seattle area.  For example, friends on the East Coast have assured me that it would never occur to New Yorkers to salute the members of the local Lenape tribe as the traditional custodians of Manhattan. 

However, I was wrong to believe that land acknowledgment handwringing belongs exclusively to the Pacific Northwest.  I was also wrong to assume that Australia’s Aborigines dwell exclusively in the north, in the vicinity of sacred Uluru, which the English colonizers conveniently renamed Ayers Rock.  Nothing could be further from the truth, as we learned on our travels to the three states that together comprise Australia’s eastern seaboard – New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.  From the Great Ocean Road, south of Melbourne, to Cairns in the tropical north, a panoply of different Aboriginal peoples—they are never called tribes—has lived and thrived since time immemorial, each with its own language, customs and claims to “country.”  Everywhere we visited, white Australians were as quick to voice the traditional land custodianship of local indigenous groups as were the many plaques at historic sites to announce them.  I was surprised to discover that land acknowledgment statements tripped off the tongues of young Australian tour leaders as quickly, easily, and unself-consciously as their ubiquitous phrase, “No worries.” 

At first, my reaction to Australian land acknowledgments matched what I feel at home in Seattle:  the statements are hypocritical and should be discredited on that basis.  But I had a change of heart when I realized that I was grateful to be learning something about the many native peoples who originally inhabited the lands in and around Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.  Could land acknowledgment statements turn out to be helpful?  Possibly, if only to inform tourists about the continuing existence of those original land custodians.  One could also argue that, in Australia’s case, the colonizers were not technically to blame for the plight of the many Aboriginal peoples, considering that the first white settlers of Australia were convicts brought forcibly from England.  They hadn’t intended to visit Australia, let alone conquer it.

Just as with Native Americans, the concept of land ownership is foreign to Aboriginal culture.  The belief of native people in most corners of the world is that they belong to the land, not the other way around.  The colonizer’s idea that he owns the land goes far to explain the environmental degradation that white people have propagated everywhere they settle, and it goes to the heart of the social conflict between whites and native peoples.  Seattleites should add to our land acknowledgment statements, “We recognize that the Coast Salish have been better custodians of the land than we have.”

My understanding that the Aborigines are spread throughout Australia came into sharp focus when we toured the Aboriginal art wing in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which was a revelation.  The bright colors and intriguing forms of Aboriginal painting are striking, even mesmerizing.  While the examples on display were sourced from across the entire continent of Australia, the aesthetic language of the paintings seemed unified to my uneducated eye.  One could title a book on Aboriginal art “Dots and Stripes,” so consistent and dominant are those two visual notations across the work of many artists and places or “countries.”  The dark, closely spaced parallel stripes are nearly always interwoven with a second set of narrow parallel lines at a slight angle to the first, as if the object were to create a painterly equivalent of fabric weaving.

 In contrast to the earth tones of the striped fields, patterns of dots, often raised from the painted surface, are rendered in vibrant primary colors.  While I gleaned that the dots have been a feature of Aboriginal art for centuries, recent artists have taken great joy in working with the bright acrylic and oil pigments that were not previously available to them.  The galaxies of vivid dots are like chocolate chips delivered in a rainbow of M & M colors.

While from across the room the Aboriginal paintings appear as spontaneous and free as any American works of abstract expressionism, the closer you approach to examine them, the more you realize how meticulous and refined the techniques are that went to produce them.  Their intricate compositions evince a rigor that can only be interpreted as meditational.  To make these paintings, the artists must be infinitely patient.  Imagining the contemplation it must take to create one of these paintings reminded me of what goes into making a mandala, even if the visual result is entirely unlike one.

But what of the Aboriginal people themselves?   We saw little of them in the big cities and hardly noticed them at all until we toured the village of Kuranda in the mountain rainforest east of Cairns, in northern Queensland.  Transported high above the rainforest canopy in one of the Skyrail gondolas that climb the mountain zip-line style, we arrived in Kuranda with just enough time for lunch and a visit to a butterfly sanctuary.  Approaching the entrance, we encountered a few Aborigines sitting aimlessly on a couple of benches facing the road, smoking and chatting among themselves. 

We wondered if they had jobs.  To reach the aviary, we had had to pass a half mile of souvenir shops and cafes, all staffed by white people.  Why weren’t any of the Aborigines running those shops?   Pondering that question, we looked up at a nearby building.  Its sign read (I’m paraphrasing here) ‘Indigenous Community Center, low-income apartments available.’  The message strongly implied that the indigenous people of Kuranda are a group apart, as removed from white Australians as America’s Indian reservations are from the towns along the nearest interstate.

This was a revelation.  It suggested that another clause should be added to the  generic Australian land acknowledgment statement, just as it should be appended to the Seattle version:

“We acknowledge that the Gadigal people have not yet fully integrated into modern society.”