40th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum

Mayoral Minute Council Meeting 5th June 2007: The 40th anniversary of the referendum on the proposal to include Aboriginal Australians in the constitution was held on Sunday 27 May.

Over 90% of Australians voted to support the changes, which gave the Federal Government the power to make laws specifically to benefit Aboriginal people, and to count Indigenous people in the census. Council is marking this important anniversary with a display at Five Dock Library, 4-12 Garfield Street, Five Dock. The display explores the background to the historic Referendum and acknowledges the Wangal, the original inhabitants of Canada Bay, and contemporary reconciliation issues.

The 1967 Referendum was a landmark event which enabled the Commonwealth to make laws relating to Aboriginal people. Effectively this meant Aboriginal people were included in the national census and had the same citizen rights as other Australians. Prior to 1967 each State made its own law for Aboriginals which led to different and sometimes discriminatory laws.

Over 90 per cent of Australians voted ‘yes’ to support the changes to the Australian Constitution giving Aboriginals the same rights as other Australians. In our local area, the seat of Lowe, 92.7 per cent of people voted ‘yes’.

A display marking the 40th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum at Five Dock Library was held from the 24 May to 8 June 2007. The display explored the background to the historic Referendum. It also acknowledged the Wangal, the original inhabitants of Canada Bay, and contemporary reconciliation issues. The display was prepared by Library staff in conjunction with David Allen, representative of the local ANTaR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation) group.

Resolution (supported by all Councillors): THAT Council acknowledge the significance of this event in Australia’s constitutional history.

Council prepared a Draft Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Study and Management Plan in 2006 which contains some interesting information about Aboriginal history and heritage. I quote from the report:

For tens of thousands of years prior to the first sighting of the Sydney region by Europeans, Aboriginal people had lived and indeed thrived in the Sydney Basin. At the time of European settlement the Canada Bay area was part of the traditional lands of the Aboriginal people of the Wangal clan, themselves a part of the larger Darug language group or Aboriginal nation.

The lives of the Wangal People and other Aboriginal clans around Port Jackson were strongly focused around the harbour and its foreshores. This is especially in the case of their food gathering activities. However Aboriginal people also hunted animals, harvested plants and gathered raw materials in the bushland fringing the harbour foreshores. For the Wangal People the harbour foreshores and bushland of The City of Canada Bay were their lands, their home and part of the one territory for which they were both responsible for and an inextricable part of. The Homebush Bay and Hen and Chicken Bay areas were, traditionally, also a major meeting place for Aboriginal people from Port Jackson and the wider Sydney region.

First contact between the new settlers and the Wangal People came in February 1788. Due to their location close to the fledgling settlement at Sydney Cove the Wangal were quickly, and irrevocably, impacted by the European colonisation. After phases of both co-operation and resistance the loss of resources, disease, and cultural disintegration soon decimated the Wangal People and, like elsewhere across the Sydney Basin, the original clans fractured and Aboriginal populations diminished. By 1860 very few of the original inhabitants of Port Jackson are believed to have remained in and around the wider Sydney settlement.

Despite these massive disruptions, government records show an Aboriginal presence in the Canada Bay area during the mid to late 1800s, and up to the 1901 Census. The Darug language was still regularly spoken in parts of western Sydney as late as 1901. Aboriginal people continued to visit and use the resources of the Canada Bay area, particularly the mangrove foreshores, throughout the 1900s. The later part of the 20th Century also saw a migration of Aboriginal people back into areas of Sydney in search of jobs and to be with family.

At the 2001 Census 228 people who identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders were recorded as living within The City of Canada Bay, representing less than .5% of the total population. Those Aboriginal people living in the area today are likely to have ties with other parts of NSW and Australia. Some may also have ties to members of the Wangal Clan, the original owners of land in the Canada Bay area. Their stories would tell of dislocation, but also of struggle and survival.

Tangible evidence of the Wangal People’s occupation and use of the area now known as The City of Canada Bay would have occurred throughout the area’s foreshore and bushland environments. However more than 200 years of European settlement and increasingly intensive land uses has overlain this original pattern of Aboriginal occupation and land use.

European land use history of the district started with early exploration and resource exploitation, leading into an initial period of land grants and failures/consolidation, to a period of developing transport infrastructure and piecemeal development in the early 1800s featuring large estates and rural activities of varying success. An initial wave of suburbanisation occurred in the late 1800s, focused in the more accessible parts of the district, followed by more widespread and rapid suburbanisation and the first wave of industrialisation in the 1900s to 1920s. All available land was urbanised or industrialised quickly during this period, in part prompting the start of an extensive programme of foreshore reclamation during the Depression and into WWII. Further industrialisation and foreshore reclamation followed WWII. More recently a wave of large-scale medium to high density residential redevelopment has overtaken the foreshores of Canada Bay, targeting older industrial sites, while a new wave of industrialisation and commercial and uses have revitalised the Rhodes area.

The legacy of these waves of intensive land use, development and redevelopment has been the destruction, removal or damage beyond recognition of the vast majority of the tangible evidence of the area’s prior occupation and use by Aboriginal people. Unfortunately little is known about the intangible – spiritual or cultural – indigenous values of the Canada Bay area.

A total of 19 tangible Aboriginal cultural heritage sites have been documented in the Canada Bay area in the recent past with 6 different site types recorded within the area – middens, rock shelters, artefacts, pigment art, an engraving, and a burial (in descending order of frequency). All occur along, or within 80 metres at most from, the foreshores of the Harbour or Parramatta River.

These site records vary considerably in their age and reliability. Two are more than 40 years old, a further 5 records are over 25 years old, while 3 sites were recorded during the 1980s and 9 sites during the 1990s. No Aboriginal sites have been formally recorded in the Canada Bay area in the last 13 years.