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Warren gives welcome

 

Warren Whitfield, a descendent of Aboriginal elder Bungaree, gave an official Aboriginal welcome at the Woy Woy Australia Day celebrations.

"I was a little bit nervous I suppose, but it was good that the people got to know who the traditional owners are of this area and some of the history of how things came to be, how they are," he said.

"It may give people a better understanding of what happened to the people around this area."

Warren has moved back to the Peninsula after years spent teaching in Queensland's north.

He was intent on dispelling the myth of the "lost tribes" of the Brisbane Water and Broken Bay area.

He said he felt a responsibility to tell the community that there were traditional owners and their descendants still in the area.

"They have been here all along. They've just been very quiet," he said.

Warren's return provides a new opportunity to revisit the story of the Peninsula clans, in part forgotten by the history books since smallpox dealt its fatal blows in the first half of the 1800s.

What was generally known of indigenous heritage is broken and scattered.

While some elements were intrinsic to the area, such as the place names that mark most towns on the Central Coast, and the engravings at Bulgandry, there were significant gaps in popular memory, he said.

"Not a lot of people know that the first white settler was James Webb," Warren said.

"There weren't too many things documented about James Webb because he died in 1848.

"So he died very early and he didn't have any white offspring to carry on his name.

"He only had one Aboriginal daughter and she only retained the Webb name until she married, so the name died out."

Webb's Aboriginal daughter was the illegitimate child from the rape of Bungaree's niece, Sophie, according to Warren.

The daughter of Sophie and James, Charlotte Webb, was Warren Whitfield's great great great grandmother.

In a sign of the nature of white-aboriginal relationships during the settlement years, Charlotte too, though married, was abused several times, Warren claimed.

It was from these unsettling acts that his extended family, the Walkeloa descendants, now stretch across a complexity of family names.

While the post-settlement history between indigenous and non-indigenous people could be confronting, a number of local organisations and businesses regarded the incorporation of Aboriginal history into community life as an important step in the Peninsula's evolution.

Wayne Peters, of Coastal EcoTours, takes his tour guests through some of the local Aboriginal living sites, visiting shell middens and caves and discussing traditional foods, medicines, art and ceremony.

"It's been a neglected aspect of the Peninsula's focus.

"We've been lost for an icon for many, many years and it's actually been staring us in the face all that time, and that's the Aboriginal culture and heritage of the area," Wayne said.

Part of the reason for this neglect, according to Ray McMinn of the Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG), was the lack of education of Aboriginal culture as more than just rock art and boomerangs.

Ray described shiny new policy books resting, hardly touched, on school and library shelves.

"What we're doing is making sure that principals and teachers and staff actually use that policy," he said.

"They pull the policy out, have a look at it and start having a major interest in the education of Aboriginal children as far as their culture goes, their spirituality, law, and really enhancing their old beliefs."

Ray said around 60 Aboriginal children began high school at the Brisbane Water Secondary College this year, but the aim of the AECG is broader than school itself.

It hopes to get parents and the wider community more involved in aboriginal education.

To this end, Ettalong Public School's community liaison officer Liz McMinn has plans for a culture display at a combined schools' festival, scheduled for September.

Ettalong is also proposing an employment program based on craft and woodwork workshops.

Warren Whitfield said: "John Pilger once produced a video called Secret Country.

"He stood on the point at Patonga and said that the traditional owners, or the people who once lived here, were a warrior tribe by the name of Dharug and were now extinct.

"Well, John was very wrong.

"They weren't Dharug. They were Wannungine-speaking people, the Guringai of the Walkeloa clan, which is our clan, and they definitely were not extinct and still aren't.

"We have survived the last 200 years and we intend to survive the next 200."

Rhiannon Treasure-Brand, February 7