Aboriginal Places & Life (Prior to 1829)

This is Whadjuk Nyungar land - never ceded, settled by treaty, or offered for sale. Archaeological evidence suggests that the Whadjuk people and their ancestors have occupied the Swan coastal plain for at least forty thousand years. The Swan River landscape has seen many changes during this period, particularly throughout the last ice age, when the Swan River mouth ended beside Rottnest Island in a great canyon, and when the river ran through a deep gorge for much of its journey towards the ocean, and yet the presence of the Whadjuk people has been a constant. 

The Perth area is a storied landscape, populated by dreaming narratives and spirit beings, but this ancient and intimate Whadjuk understanding of the landscape is also evident in the language. For example, during his imprisonment on Carnac Island in 1832, the warrior Yagan demonstrated the geology of the plains to Robert Menli Lyon, his jailer and student, when he described the three long bands of geological formation on the coastal plain as Boyeembarra, or limestone country, and secondly Gandoo, or what is known as the Bassendean sands formation, and finally Warget, the more fertile Pinjarra formation nearest the Darling Scarp, each characterised by particular vegetation and soil types. 

This was a landscape tended by fire. Important were the wetlands, where yam and other root stock were gathered, and where turtles, gilgies and birdlife were captured. Often remarked upon by the first settlers were the fertile pasturelands, designed to encourage the free grazing of kangaroo, amid deliberately preserved islands of forest where hunters lay in wait, and the general parklike vegetation, which enabled ease of access and travel. The site of what became the Perth CBD (Boorloo) was particularly rich with wetlands, and a wilgie (ochre) pit, whose ridges were populated by giant (King) jarrah, tuart and marri woodlands. Fish were speared down by Heirisson Island (Matagarup) and along the shoreline, while at Claisebrook (Mardalup) there existed a deep freshwater lagoon, and ancient stands of tea-tree, banksia and zamia palm (estimated at some 700 years old.) 

The Perth metropolitan area also contained many grounds of ceremonial importance, and many were centred on what has become the CBD. According to Nyungar elder Barry Maguire, ceremonies took place at Kings Park, one of many Nyitting (cold times), or dreaming places, where ritual and story intersected and the land and culture was maintained, such as at Gooninup, where Kennedy’s Fountain and the Swan Brewery later operated, and where the serpent creator spirit known as the Wagyl rose up the limestone cliff and onto the ‘women’s place’ near what is now the Pioneer Women’s Memorial in Kings Park. At the base of the cliff, stones of significance left by the Wagyl were maintained by the Whadjuk people, and sacred objects were hidden in different places around the foot of the bluff. 

It is a point made by Nyungar writer and Miles Franklin Award winning novelist Kim Scott that generosity derives from a position of strength, and confidence in one’s culture, and it was often said of the custodian of the Perth area at the time of European settlement, Yellagonga, that despite being displaced from his favoured camps, he remained generous and amiable. One of these settlers, Robert Menli Lyon, in mourning Yellagonga’s death, said that in fact ‘the settlers are greatly indebted for the protection of their lives and property’. Centuries later, it is a measure of Whadjuk Nyungar resilience that, according to elder Barry Maguire, in spite of the city that has grown up on this place, and in spite of the fact that the Whadjuk Nyungar bore the brunt of European colonisation, the stories of this place are still being sung, the language is being spoken, and the place is still being ceremonially ‘looked after.’