Darlinghurst Stories

The place where the rushes grow

Kogerah was a place where blackbutt, red gum trees and others stood tall and in abundance, like quiet sentinels surveying a pristine harbour. Believed to mean ‘place where the rushes grow’, Kogerah was and is Gadigal Country.¹

For generations the Gadigal people and their neighbouring Sydney clans expertly fished the harbour aboard nawi (bark canoes) and speared maugro (fish) from the shore with garrara (pronged spears).

Sometimes, they lay across their nawi, motionless, their faces in the water looking for fish and spears ready for ‘darting’.²

Goolgadie, the grasstree from which the word Gadigal is derived, provided both food and raw materials: nectar from its flowers, its flowering stem as spear shafts, resin as an adhesive, and fronds for headdresses.³

The women, often with children in tow, used burra (shell hooks) which they flung into the water attached to carr-e-jun (fishing lines). Aboard their nawi, they sang as they reeled in their catch and cooked over small fires laid aboard on seaweed or sand. Their nawi were among their most treasured possessions, as tools for survival and a means of connection with Country.⁴

They used rock-shelters and built bark huts close to freshwater streams. They hunted kangaroos, wallabies and other land mammals. They collected kaadian (Sydney cockle), badangi (rock oyster), dalgal (mussel), and other shellfish.

A stream of clear, fresh water cut through Kogerah, pooling and cascading before it reached mudflats and flowed into the bay. It was part of many wetland systems across Sydney, which extended south, far beyond this area, and drained into Kamay (Botany Bay).⁵

This system sustained a variety of life:

It swarmed with aquatic birds of every description, red bills, water hens, bitterns, quail, frequently all kinds of ducks, and, when in season, snipe and landrails, and at all times bronze-winged pigeons could be had in abundance.

Brush wallabies were also very numerous in the vicinity….the head of the swamp was a great resort for dingoes.⁶

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"Warra, warra, wai"!

When the Berewalgal (people from ‘very far’) arrived in January 1788, they began marking areas of fresh water and renaming Aboriginal land.

These mi-yal (strangers) were the people of the First Fleet, most of which were convicts, and others, government officials and naval officers and their families. After declaring Kamay (Botany Bay) unsuitable for their penal settlement a party of three small boats sailed through Port Jackson, which Governor Arthur Phillip called ’the finest harbour in the world’.¹

As the ships sailed beyond Kamay and through Port Jackson in search of a place to land, Aboriginal people were observed following the boats from their vantage points along the shores, shaking their spears and shouting ‘warra, warra, warra’ or ‘warra warra wai’. The berewalgal assumed this meant ‘go away’, however, Gweagal and Dharawal knowledge holders have since reinterpreted this encounter through the complex lens of language, culture and spirituality. ²

One Dharawal Dreaming story tells of the return of guwinj (spirit or ghost) travelling among low-lying clouds. As Dunghutti/Dharawal scientist, Dr Shane Ingrey, notes: ‘Looking at these events through a spiritual lens we came to understand some of the spiritual reasoning in interpreting those events.’³

Ray Ingrey, chairperson of the Gujaga Foundation, explains:

In Dharawal the word ‘warra’ means dead and is associated with the colour white. When we emphasise something we double the word. The suffix ‘-wai’ on the end of the warrawarra means ‘they all’, so from a Dharawal language perspective the words being said in 1770 and then 1788 mean ‘they are all dead’ and not ‘go away’.⁴

Read the next part of the story.