Saturday, August 7, 2021

INDEX - ABORIGINAL

CULTURAL SAFETY
Aboriginal/Wiradjuri people should be aware that this archive contains images and names of deceased persons in photographs and printed material. Some quoted articles contain outdated terminology and views of authors that would not be considered appropriate today.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. 
Please email goodimanglg@gmail.com to report anything of concern.

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 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).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I acknowledge that for centuries before invasion, the Wiradjrui 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.
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