CULTURAL SAFETY
Aboriginal/Wiradjuri people should be aware that this archive contains images and names of deceased persons in photographs and text. Some quoted articles contain outdated terminology and views of authors that would not be considered appropriate today. This is not meant to cause any offence.
INDEX
- ABORIGINAL PLACENAMES & MEANINGS
- ABORIGINAL ART
- ABORIGINAL ARTEFACTS
- ACKNOWLEDGMENT (see below)
- AN ABORIGINAL ALBINO
- DIANA MUDGEE
- DISPLACEMENT
- FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH
- FRONTIER WARS
- GOVERNOR FAMILY
- GUNTHER LECTURES 1858
- KING TOGEE
- KING TONY
- NEWS ITEMS
- STOLEN GENERATION
- WIRADJURI HISTORY - from Mudgee History Group
- WIRADJURI NATION - by Norman McVicker
- WOLLAR ABORIGINAL HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
The idea of writing an Aboriginal history is a very white one. For Aboriginal people, life is a continuum of connections between ancestors, Country and people; not "then" and "now", simply "always". Knowledge was accumulated over thousands of years of close connection to the land and it was passed on in stories and songs. Colonisation had a catastrophic effect on these age-old teaching traditions. Lives, languages and culture were lost through the introduction of foreign diseases, and the decades of Frontier Wars, as explorers and settlers competed for scarce resources with the custodians of the land. This archive does not claim to know Aboriginal history. Rather, it is a telling of the arrival of white men in the Gulgong district and a record of the impact on the Wiradjuri people (where known).
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I acknowledge that for centuries before invasion, the Wiradjuri people were the custodians of this land and they lived sustainably and harmoniously in the natural environs of the rivers, hills and forests that surround Gulgong today. They were unaware that a shiny rock under the land they cared for would bring hordes of men, greedy for riches, who would destroy the forests, tear up the ground and take Wiradjuri homelands for themselves.
