Liverpool Regional Museum
Stories of Liverpool 1788 – 1900
Wednesday 16 July 1997
Notes for Mrs Hazel Hawke
Mr Mayor, Mr Black, ladies and gentlemen; it gives me great pleasure to be with you today for the opening of this important exhibition.
One of the reasons I accepted the invitation to become the third Chair of the Heritage Council is my belief that a society that doesn’t respect and value the evidence of its past is a society that cannot look to the future with confidence or authority because it doesn’t know where it has been. We need historians and history books of course, but we also need a living heritage of places that remind us of the people we once were. Without these constant daily reminders of the past we live in a rootless present. In my view, that is neither healthy nor desirable.
Times and attitudes do change of course; the Victorian terraces and Federation house the majority of Sydneysiders admire today were not looked on too kindly by the modernists in the 1950s and 60s. I think this shows that what we are dealing with in heritage is values – individual values and community values.
Through my connections with the Brotherhood of St Laurence and other community organisations during the last forty years, I have come to know a lot about values and how they change. Our world has changed a great deal since the Green Bans of the late 60s and we have changed with it. The State Government and local councils now work together to protect the things we value.
What I want to do during my term as Chair is to encourage more people in the community to take an active role in defining the places they value so that steps can be taken to conserve and protect them.
We need to look beyond the obvious items of European colonial heritage and ask ourselves questions about those things that we value and that make us distinctively Australian.
For its part, the Heritage Council is taking the first steps in adding Aboriginal, movable and natural heritage to our portfolio of responsibilities.
I am pleased to report that the terms of reference and membership of an Aboriginal Heritage Committee were approved by the Heritage Council at its meeting last week. We recognise that this will be a long process involving a great deal of consultation. But a start has been made and we very much look forward to receiving the committee’s advice in the coming months.
We have also received a report from the movable heritage task force established by the Minister last year and look forward to the first steps in the implementation of its recommendations.
Discussions have also begun with the National Parks and Wildlife Service to create a framework for the incorporation of natural heritage into the Heritage Council’s sphere of influence.
In another initiative to broaden its brief, the Heritage Council has commenced a two year Ethnic Communities Consultation Program.
We are providing additional financial support for the Marrickville heritage study review so that translation and interpretation services will assist the consultants to obtain the advice and input of the many ethnic groups in that local government area.
In addition, we will shortly be approaching the peak ethnic community organisations to involve them in deciding which places of particular importance to ethnic groups should be included in the State Heritage Inventory as heritage items of State significance.
This exhibition is a wonderful demonstration of what local councils can do to help communities to understand how the places they live in began and how they developed. Using the historical research and insight of Christopher Keating’s book ‘On the Frontier’, the exhibition gives us vivid accounts of lives of ordinary Australians; stories of gossip, murder, scandal and bankruptcy, as well as of pioneering struggle, endurance, innovation, achievement and occasionally failure.
Importantly, the exhibition also tells us stories about the original inhabitants of this place, the Dharug people. Because food was so plentiful here, they could settle in one place for weeks or even months at a time.
Then early last century, this place was the site of Governor Macquarie’s experiment with social engineering. He wanted Liverpool to be a place for small farmers to cultivate crops using convict labour. But these plans collapsed.
The land-holders knew nothing about farming, fire, insects and flood destroyed the crops and most of them eventually sold out to gentlemen graziers whom Macquarie loathed.
What an extraordinary story! And yet it was not so long ago that scholars claimed with all seriousness that there was not history in Australia, no stories to tell! How fortunate we are that exhibitions like this can give the lie to that sort of nonsense.
This exhibition tells us stories about the living past; of real people coping with difficult challenges and conflicts. I hope the schools and families in this area will be encouraged to come here to gain some understanding of the development of Liverpool from a struggling town into the major city of today. And I am sure that by explaining the past so vividly, the exhibition will lay the groundwork for a more active appreciation of the city’s remaining heritage sites in the future.
We need may more voices involved in the continuing debate about what we value and what we want to keep. There’s not much point in going into battle to save a historic site or a significant landmark if it is only the ‘experts’ that recognise its importance.
Surely, the most effective way to wind a community over to the importance of looking after its heritage is to give it the responsibility for managing it. The Heritage Council and the professional experts are there to give a helping hand when special expertise is required.
But it is the community’s heritage, and the direct responsibility for managing it is the best way, I believe, of encouraging the community to express its values through local heritage policies.
I therefore congratulate the staff and curators and you and your council, Mr Mayo, for this most innovative and beautifully presented exhibition. It is initiatives like these that councils can take a lead in encouraging the community to respect the past while building a better future.
Two years ago, historian Bruce Pennay produced a useful guide for local government councillors which was funded by the Heritage Council. I can’t think of a better way of concluding that by quoting his words:
“Heritage matters because it helps people to understand what kind of
community they live in, what it was and what it hopes to be. It defines
what is distinctive about the local area and its people. It establishes
identity.”
Thank you for inviting me here tonight. I am pleased to declare this important exhibition open for business.
In dedication to Mrs Betty Biffin, a passionate, devoted and hardworking
Friend of the Liverpool Regional Museum.
Liverpool Regional Museum
Stories of Liverpool
1788 – 1900
Table of Contents
Aboriginal Culture in 1788
The first people of Liverpool
Living off the land
The toolkit
The Frontier: Dispossession and Settlement 1790 – 1816
The early years of Liverpool
Agricultural labourers
‘Iron’ gangs
Book One
Page 1 – Pemulwuy the resistance leader
Page 2 – The voyage of Tom Thumb
Page 3 – Thomas and Rachel Moore of Moorebank
Page 4 – Eber Bunker of Collingwood
Page 5 – Richards and Christiana Brooks of Denham Court
Page 6 – Struggling farmers at Irish Town
Page 7 – Michael Dwyer the Wicklow chieftain
Page 8 – Pubs and the people
Page 9 – Daily life on a convict iron gang
Building a Town: 1816 – 1830
‘Strangers in their own land’
Book Two
Page 1 – Polly and Betty Fulton and the Native Institutions
Page 2 – Maria Lock, an Aboriginal woman who defied Church and Government
Page 3 – Namut (Gilbert) the first professional Aboriginal tracker
Page 4 – Aboriginal survivors and their white friends
Page 5 – Charles Throsby explorer and champion of the Aboriginal rights
Page 6 – Francis Greenway and the building of Liverpool
Page 7 – Convict gangs clearing the bush
Page 8 – Bushrangers romantic heroes or brutal thieves?
Page 9 – Police, law and order
Page 10 – The murder of John Brackfield
Page 11 – James Meehan surveyor and ex-convict
Page 12 – The male Orphan School
Page 13 – James Busby the father of Australian wine making
A Place with excellent Prospects: 1830 – 1840
Aboriginal people – struggling to survive
Liverpool and district – looking for prosperity
Colonial industry – feeding and housing the people
John Blaxland’s Mill
Book Three
Page 1 – Convict women servants a blessing and a burden
Page 2 – Lansdowne Bridge – gateway to the rich south lands
Page 3 - Wool and wheat – growing gold
Page 4 – Liverpool Hospital
After the Convicts: 1840 – 1872
The convicts leave the town
The arrival of the railway
JH Atkinson – pioneer industrialist
Cumberland Agricultural Show
Charles Ledger introduced alpacas to Australia
Book Four
Page 1 – Making Australia like home – the Acclimatisation Societies
Page 2 – Thomas Holt, entrepreneur
Page 3 – Small farmers the Braithwaite’s and the Taylors
Page 4 – Saul Samuel – man of many talents
Page 5 – The Asylum for the Infirm and Destitute
Page 6 – Moore Theological College – for training Anglican priests
Page 7 – Mary Theresa Vidal – the first woman writer to publish in Australia
Boom and Bust: 1872 – 1892
Life on the land
Aboriginal people and the Aborigines Protection Board
Life in the Town
Hoxton Park Estate
Our Children’s Home orphanage and school
Book Five
Page 1 – Local Government – independence at a price
Page 2 – Richard Sadleir, the first Mayor of Liverpool
Page 3 – The Gas Works – light for some
Page 4 – Water and wast
Page 5 – The Paper Mill
Page 6 – Christiansen’s brick kilns
Page 7 – Old Liverpool Shops: Nathanial Bull’s Commercial Stores
Page 8 – Liverpool Asylum for the Infirm and Destitute
Page 9 – The Flying Pieman Australia’s first marathon man?
Page 10 – James Tucker, convict author
Page 11 – St Anne’s Orphanage
Page 12 – Liverpool Public School
Page 13 – Environmental changes
The Poorhouse Town
The 1888 Centenary celebration
The Asylum for the Infirm and Destitute – the Old Men’s Home
Having a good time
Racing and horse breeding
William ‘Black Bill’ Forrester of Warwick Park
Aboriginal Culture in 1788
The first people of Liverpool
The Liverpool area was once the land of the Cabrogal band of the Dharug people.
Thousands of Aboriginal people lived on the coastal plain around Sydney in 1788. The Cabrogal band of the Dharug-speaking people lived around Liverpool and Cabramatta. Among surrounding Aboriginal people, they were famous as karraji (healers and medicine men).
Food was so plentiful there that groups could live on one site from weeks to months at a time. A village with 70 huts was described near Bent’s Basin on the Nepean, although 6-8 huts were more common. Their neighbours were the Curingai, the Dharawl and the Gandangara. They visited the Liverpool area often to join in the big kangaroo hunts and corroborees.
Living off the land
In the bush, there was plenty of food if you knew where to look
Women gathered the basic foods – shellfish, yams, fruits, roots and small game. Many vegetable foods were poisonous without expert preparation – Burrawang (Macrozamia) had to be soaked in running water for several days before being ground into flour and then baked as flat cakes.
In 1788, the neighbouring Eora described the Dharug as ‘climbers of trees’, men who lived by hunting. Men climbed trees after possum, koalas and flying fox. They set snares for quail and dug pitfall traps for small mammals. They used tapering traps 12-15 meters (40-50 feet) long to catch larger animals. Fish traps were set among creeks and rivers while mullet and bass were speared with multi-pronged fish spears. Men also caught eels, platypus, yabbies, mussels, tortoises and water birds.
The toolkit
Making it in the bush
A woman’s most important tool was her digging stick, which she used to dig up vegetable tubers and to kill small animals. Women carried everything from food to babies in wooden containers. Net bags and hunting nets were produced using string made from possum fur and vegetable fibre. Baskets were woven from plants such as the reeds that grew beside the river.
Men hunted, fished and fought with spears barbed with stone, wooden clubs, throwing sticks, boomerangs, and mogo (ground-edge axes). From special stones, they made blades, scrapers and chisels for the purposes of woodworking, butchering animals and making skin cloaks. Using glue produced from plant gums and beeswax, a stone flake was attached to the end of a spear- thrower to make an adze.
Bark was used for many purposes. A large piece of bark tied at each end by vines produced a canoe. By bending the middle of a large sheet of bark and attaching another sheet placed at one end, quick weather-proof huts were made. Mothers wrapped their babies in paperbark to keep them warm and dry.
Fires were lit regularly according to the season to generate new grass, which kangaroos like to graze. Fire was also strategically used by groups of men to drive herds of kangaroos into the weapons of waiting hunters.