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Seeking Sydney, Episode 6: Leichhardt, a case study OR The history’s not fabulous

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Seeking Sydney is a podcast that travels to the landscapes and landmarks of Sydney, adding the people and their stories. I will publish one episode every month for ten months. Episode 5 is now available in your podcast subscription, on the Spineless Wonders website, in Apple podcasts or Spotify or iHeart!

Episode 6 is called A Case Study, OR, The history’s not fabulous. It’s a case study because it’s all about Leichhardt, about how it sits on Dharawal land and how that land has been carved up since colonisation. It’s a case study because this happened in Leichhardt but also throughout Sydney, and Australia.

It’s called, ‘The history’s not fabulous’ because that’s what Aunty Deborah Lennis – Dharawal woman, Cultural Advisor to Inner West Council – says, with magnificent understatement. She’s talking about how things have been from ‘day dot, when Cook first put his feet on the shores, at Stingray Bay, at Kamay, there.’

That’s how she ends this episode, but she also starts it, with a magnificent welcome to country. She then describes the lands and people of the Dharawal, and how they traded along the route that became Parramatta Rd.

Speaking of Parramatta Rd – could it ever be improved? And what does architect John Richardson mean when he talks about it as a ‘high street’? I look at it differently since my discussion with him.

Parramatta Rd is the southern boundary of the suburb of Leichhardt, so we look at how the suburb was developed, from being Dharawal land to being divided up into smaller and smaller plots for the colonists and those who came after them. You might be interested to look at some of the following links:

Leichhardt is commonly associated with the Italian people who started settling there in the 1940s, so we look at that influence and start to consider the experience of migrants in Sydney. Looking at the census figures over the years, the numbers of Italians rise and fall.

And speaking of censuses – don’t forget that Aboriginal people weren’t included in the census until after the 1967 referendum. Lawyer and activist Professor Mick Dodson wrote an article in 1999 called, CITIZENSHIP IN AUSTRALIA: An Indigenous Perspective that powerfully describes how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were denied citizenship before 1967. Historian Ann-Mari Jordens has also written an interesting article about Australian citizenship, and Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson considers the nature of the citizenship granted here.

Having no citizenship rights included being governed by the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board. A good place to start to read about those restrictions is here, with Anita Heiss’s article.

To view the beautiful Breathe memorial that Deborah Lennis refers to, find it here. The designers, mili mili, describe it here. The other survival memorial that we discuss is Douglas Grant’s Harbour Bridge in Callan Park. Some more information here.

And, just for comic relief – for those who remember the old Leichhardt Council and would like to relive those days, what could be better than watching (or rewatching) Rats in the Ranks?

By the way …

Some fun facts about previous episodes that show that research is a never-ending process:

  • A beautiful telling of the Gweagal people’s discovery of James Cook and his crew that I could have referred to in Episode 1: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/eight-days-in-kamay/introduction/1
  • Also in Episode 1, I referred to dugong bones that were excavated during the creation of the Alexandra Canal. On this page of the Dictionary of Sydney there’s a lot of information about the area, and a photo of that excavation. Architect John Richardson has since told me that his great-grandfather, Robert Etheridge Jr, is one of the men in that photo standing over the dig as he was Curator of the Australian Museum. John suspects that the ‘head’ in the image is probably Edgeworth David.
  • There’s a clever website that maps Liverpool St Darlinghurst from the 1850s to the 1940s that I could have referred to in Episode 2: https://darlostories.au/
  • In Episode 4, I spoke to Felicity Castagna about her collaboration on a performance called ‘What is the city but the people?’. Turns out that title is a quote from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and a very revolutionary statement it is too.
  • And in Episode 5 I referred to the Eveleigh Railway Workshops employing many Aboriginal people: here’s an article, with pictures, that gives some great details on Aboriginal workers in Sydney, written by Anita Heiss. The whole Barani website is worth a (lengthy) browse.

Acknowledgements

Interviewees for episode 6: my thanks to you all

Deborah Lennis, Cultural Advisor Inner West Council

John Richardson, Sydney architect

Bette Mifsud: A first-generation Maltese-Australian visual artist who grew up on family market-gardens in North Western Sydney during the 1960s and 70s, and now lives on Dharug and Gundungurra lands in the Blue Mountains. Her website is at https://www.bette-mifsud.com/#/ and Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/bette.mifsud/ 

Thanks also to:

Bronwyn Mehan, Spineless Wonders

Martin Gallagher, Echidna Audio: sound design

Zoe Hercus: publicity

Bettina Kaiser: logo & artwork

Here are the sources for the figures that I quote :

Information about ‘the first coffee machine’:

Other references:

The Road to Parramatta: Some notes on its history, by James Jervis. Royal Australian Historical Society Journal 1927 Vol. XIII, Part II, p.65.

B Groom and W Wickman. Leichhardt: an era in pictures. Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, 1982, p77.

David Sironi. A look at Leichhardt from 1962 on. Leichhardt Local History Library 994.41/SIR

Grenville to Phillip, 22 August 1789. HRA I, 1, pp.124-6. Reproduced in Select Documents in Australian History 1788-1850. CMH Clark (ed). A&R 1950, p218.

Instructions to Phillip, 25 April 1787. HRA I, 1, pp.14-15. Reproduced in Select Documents in Australian History 1788-1850. CMH Clark (ed). A&R 1950, p219.

Anthony Cusick, “Leichhardt West: Original land grants and subdivisions” in Leichhardt Historic Journal #16 June 1989, p18 & 45.

Phil Dowling. Leichhardt Public School Centenary Souvenir 1962.

‘Migrants in Leichhardt’: notes on a talk given at Leichhardt Town Hall 1 August 1972 by Penny Lush, Michael White, Margaret Jervis

Information on Italians in Leichhardt relies on IH Burnley, ‘Italian settlement in Sydney 1920-78’, Australian Geographical Studies, 1981, Vol.19; IH Burnley, The impact of immigration on Australia: A demographic approach, OUP 2001; Jock Collins, ‘Ethnic Diversity Down Under: Ethnic precincts in Sydney’ International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations Vol 4, 2004-2006; The History and Heritage of Italian-Australians in the Leichhardt Local Government Area, Leichhardt Municipal Council, 2001.