Professor Peter Read AM

Caitlin Morrissey 

So, Peter, we thought a good place to start with, perhaps hear a little bit more about your work on the Aboriginal history of Sydney and then we'll ask you more specifically about what The DNA of Sydney is to you. But of course, we know that your large project A History of Aboriginal Sydney is very influential. So perhaps you could talk us through that and what you learned along the way.

Peter Read 

My original intention was to create a large book on the history of Aboriginal Sydney. But once I began, I realised that if I want people to take notice-- particularly Aboriginal people, they're much less likely to read a 500-page book than there were to look at a website. As soon as you're talking websites, you're talking real people. As soon as you're talking real people, we're talking interviews. And although most of my work has been done on tape, there's no point in doing tape online, you do a camera. And there’s about eight of us, I think all together and had an Indigenous camera person and operator, and so was the liaison person, as well as the editor for a while. So we interviewed about 300 or so Aboriginal people, not only elderly people, although there tended to be people past middle age, I suppose. And there's only one or two, only one, I think, non-Aboriginal person who appears in that, who's one who's a local historian who's done a lot of the work, Heather Goodall. Everybody else was Indigenous. And as I said, there's about 350 interviews I think all together with about 300 individual speakers, which gave us a pretty good idea of how Sydney was functioning.

But there's an important thing to say is that Aboriginal Sydney does not function now like it used to. We have about 30,000 Indigenous people living in Sydney. I think it's a very, very large number of whom some are the Indigenous, original descendants from that Country, and everybody else has come from somewhere else. Aboriginal Sydney as it used to be before everyone arrived and perhaps till about 1930 was essentially water-based. That is, it relied on the Sydney Harbour and the major rivers, Parramatta River and the Georges River and the Nepean-Hawkesbury system, and all the tributaries and creeks there to get around here. Not only to move around but to do your trading, do your socialising. Meetings are almost always on river sites. Because large meetings need lots of food. And large meetings might go on for two or three weeks that needs lots of lots of food. And you generally only do that in a bumper season. And the old people were very good at predicting when a bumper season was going to be they have lots of waterbirds, for instance. And when you got a good season coming up, the message would go out that is time to hold a perhaps 'biennial'-- it wasn't thought of in those terms-- but a meeting of all the people of Sydney and the Sydney footprint coming from the other side of the Blue Mountains from very long distances away from up and down the south coast and north coast would come together to discuss various points of issue. Now, I don't know what they were and what they were lost in time basically now. We know they were important and they lasted a long time. So, sea roots are very, very important. What's more, they formed places of interchange. There's when Duck Creek flows into the Parramatta River not far from the road. Not only was that a place where large gatherings were held, but also it was where the salt water met the fresh water and therefore that became a very important exchange cycle. Partly because it was convenient and partly because saltwater people are known as saltwater people for a good reason. That is, the the saltwater tribespeople's language groups of Sydney would tend to have their mythology and their stories and their economy and their relatives drawn from the salt water what are known as the forest people to potentially Dharug people in the western side of the Sydney basin.

Now, of course, the Dharug people were very-- the Hawkesbury River was very much, very, very important to them. You know where it is, just in the base of the Blue Mountains, but it doesn't get salty until about Sackville. So they were mainly working with freshwater, they go up and down the river, their relatives are up and down the river also, and you marry up and down the river. And you can trace that even now in the way that marriages are formed, then relative routings and so on. So that's the first thing. Water is fundamentally important as, as everything actually, up to 1930 or something probably anyway when motorboats come in and Aboriginal people have access to them, it makes it easier. Still, up till then you got to do on a sailing boat, or before that in a canoe. And don't forget, Aboriginal women have been seen by the early European seafarers to be floating in their canoes, some of them with a baby, three or three or four miles out to sea. So they did pretty good sailors, like all hunters and gatherers, really, you know, the way.

We know how well people around the Pacific could navigate and Aboriginal people had no need to navigate across distances, but they certainly were able to navigate distances outside their heads keep afloat, and they're pretty narrow canoes, and also have a baby and cook your tucker, in the boat when it was caught. Not a bad feat, hey. Okay. So, so we're still relying very much on that water transport system. As soon as motorcars can come in, and Aboriginal people have got them by the 1950s, or a little bit earlier. And then they've got utilities, they can catch fish per ticket to market in a truck. And so at that point, the river system becomes much less important. And they become on the face of it, it looks like they're like every other kind of ethnic grouping in Sydney but they're not. Now we know that Italians all tend to, for instance, go to like art and have a film around there. Aboriginal people gathering, and this is still just as apparent as it always was, in family groups. Even now, you tend to have more extended family living within the same footprint of maybe half a dozen suburbs. Now obviously, not everybody does it depend on your socio-economic status. But I think you'd find to a surprising extent, Aboriginal people, Aboriginal families, and even those who've come into Sydney later on, hang out together. While British families who don't have so many relatives to come to for a start, or French, or the Southern Europeans with large, extended families tend to hang out together. And of course, later on Vietnamese and all the Southeast Asian communities tend to hang out together, because they tend to have chain migration, people living together, and they come to know where their relatives are. While probably French, German, British Isles people don't have such large extended families to go to and they tend to spread out more according to where their friends have gone or whether they've been told to go or according to their socio-economic class. So Aboriginal people are still hanging out in families now. If not, that fact may not be very widely known except by those people themselves, of course, because sometimes they don't look very Aboriginal and sometimes they're living in houses like everybody else. But in the 1960s you could have in any given street in Western Sydney, half the street could be inhabited with by Aboriginal families. There used to be known as a mission as a settlement. Now that was that was partly because people are going with their relatives, partly because there's safety in numbers, you know where your Aboriginal families are. You don't necessarily be related to them, but you're hanging out together because there's safety in numbers.

It would be known as an Aboriginal enclave with its pluses and minuses, it might be more difficult to rent a house, but at least you'd be you'd be with your associates can't say family can't even say friends. But at least there would be people that they're going to hang out with or associate with and you'd be going to school with each other's children and so on. So it's a changing Sydney dynamic, but water has been lost as a unifying element. But the geographical boundaries of families hanging out together in certain suburbs, that does remain to be quite strong now. Even though the Gundungurra people whose Country used to extend all the way from Campbelltown, right across the mountains down to the other side, there's not many Gundungurra people live in Campbelltown now, but they've moved to another part of their Country, which is up in run the Blue Mountain round Katoomba, Wentworth Falls, Blackheath up and down their lower Blue Mountains as well. So it's still part Gundungurra Country. And that's where they are now. Even though you might go to Campbelltown. And so it looks as where the Gundungurra Land Council has its has its base while we're recording. And so the Gundungurra Land Council might be run with people who are not going to garage and they're all living somewhere else.

Greg Clark 

And Peter, would you mind just saying a few words about the main groups of people and to what extent their territories and their Country's historically did overlap. But to what extent this process of change that you've just described means that they now overlap more, that would be very helpful, because obviously, we've heard a lot about the Gadigal people, we've heard about the Gundungurra people, but we don't have a very clear map in our minds and what that means.

Peter Read 

So up north, you've got the Gundungurra people that is north of Sydney, north of the Hawkesbury River really. And I certainly don't want to be-- I'm not being prescriptive about these things. Things are very urgently and angrily debated at this very moment that I'm talking to you. So I'm not going to start by saying who is what. The Gadigal people what sometimes they call her generally within the saltwater Sydney basin, I suppose. But that's very contested because sometimes the Dharug, the Western people, that's the forest people are talking about, sometimes they're subsumed into that. The Dharawal people is really south of Botany Bay and they still hang out very strongly. Don't forget, Gaimaragal people. And as my friend Dennis Foley and I wrote the book, he's like a Gaimaragal man and their Country is in a lot of the north and most of the North Shore there. And there's other all sorts of minor groups, people in the Dharug Country can now identify their clan territory when it was identified by the early settlers and explorers and so on. So various Aboriginal friends of mine can identify the clan that they come from.

These groupings are still very much alive and well. You have the people living in their traditional Country, far more than non-Aboriginal people realise, I think they think there's always blackfellas living everywhere, but they're not the original families are very much still in the pleasure where they've always been and they haven't gone. And sometimes even people who have been important in Sydney, have left Sydney and gone back to where their traditional groupings have come from. When we say that it's not-- of course it's not anything mystical about out there, they'll go back to where they come-- they recognise the Country and go back to their families. And those families, big family extended groupings. And there might be three or four, a dozen, major families in any of those areas, people have tended to go back there or have never left on the first place.

Greg Clark

Peter that I think is a fantastic introduction for us to the span of your work. And by the way, I'm working my way through your most recent book, and really enjoying that. And the material on your website is fantastic. And we've also, of course, seen some of the things that you've done that are up on YouTube as well. So we've got a bit of a sense of it. And I think we should go straight into the sort of two big questions. And maybe you could answer them in any order in any combination that makes sense to you. But if you like question one is, given all of this work that you've done, how do you see The DNA of Sydney if there was if there was a set of specificities about Sydney, that make it different to any other city in the world? What would they be in your mind? And then, of course, the big question is, how far has your sense of what makes Sydney unique been as it were inherited, and derived from Aboriginal culture, civilisation, families? And then there's a third question, which is, to what extent is this visible or seeable, somehow, today? That's really the set of three questions we'd like to get in, but you may want to attack them from any order.

Peter Read 

I think the geography of Sydney is pretty important. Because, you know, I grew up in the north shore of Sydney. Well, the Pacific Highway is on a ridge, it's very, very rough Country, all throughout. And you can see still, if you're driving past Hornsby going north, you can see what rough Country it is. On either side, one side goes down to the Cowan Creek waterway, Jerusalem Bay and so on. On the other one, it's heading up towards up Ebenezer, I suppose but I went a very rough, rough, very rough Country in between. And therefore, the sense of geography is in part very much in this part of Sydney shaped by where you can go and where you can't go.

Because the major roads following Aboriginal trade routes, follow the ridges, and so does the Great Western highway. And less so down south because it is a kind of flatter Country through the Royal National Park and heading towards Wollongong. But do you know the Warragamba Dam, of course, that was a very rich farming area at one time and that had its own integrity, which wasn't necessarily a Sydney based. People in Warragamba Dam used to sell their produce south. It's hard to believe now because it was actually easy to get up there and get on the train line, once that was built, rather than heading north into Sydney itself. That's something that's always struck me as a historian of places that was most of one thing, one thing that I am, is, as soon as you get there, you realise at any particular place, you realise, as the crow flies, for Aboriginal people, is really different from as the crow flies to us. We think we non-Aboriginal people today, think of the difference between A and B or how to get from A to B is what routes you take. And what road it's kind of obvious, really. But Aboriginal people being foot walkers used a lot more routes than we do today. There were there were several routes up the Blue Mountains, from a long way south from Campbelltown. And even further beyond there. They're very difficult routes. But if you're hunting and gathering very fit, walk about society that they didn't go all the way to Sydney and follow the Great Western Highway route up there and Bells Line of Road they use a system of tracks and pathways which have since been abandoned. So the geography of course in the West, the West in the Sydney version is much flatter, and I suppose people do relate to each other differently there by the by the rather major roads they are there's a freeway and of course in the Great Western Highway itself. I've never lived there but I have a lot to do with Aboriginal communities who are out there so I don't want to speak for anybody else but I do know there are certain groups of Fijians and Samoans for instance, who live in southern suburbs of Western Sydney, hang out there, and that they're probably like families in rural towns who didn't get to the big smoke. My daughter used to live in-- she used to for a while she was at a holiday with the gap scheme and she lived near Cambridge, that was a little town Stow-on-the-World and there were people that had never been to London!

And so I think it's very probable that, for instance, I'm just guessing, not to insult anybody but the Fijian community living out towards Penrith doesn't need to go out of go out of that part of the world very much. They might go to Penrith or to Parramatta. But the, the idea of going into Sydney would be maybe apart from the markets got to get to produce. It's not nearly so an obvious thing to do, as it would be if you're an Anglo with a car living in Penrith and maybe commuting to every day to Parramatta or even points further to the east there. So I'm talking about individual communities here that the geography doesn't determine probably to, to the same extent, how you're going to react and hang out together or what the essence of the DNA city is. There's so many. I suggested you read a poem called Anna Kalani, I think she must be Greek call it Parramatta Sestina. I always liked that poem because she describes I think she lived in Western Sydney and she described the route she took her father used to take all the way into Parramatta or perhaps it was Parramatta to the sea but it delineates all the separate routes that you took. A lovely little poem because it's so full of particularities called Parramatta Sestina.

Greg Clark 

You're saying something here very important, Peter about what we might call highways, byways, trackways walkways, that the ways in which people navigated the terrain, determine not just settlement patterns and trading patterns, but also in a sense, cultural interactions and the journey from home to somewhere whether it was marketplace or place of hunting and gathering or place of creation, that those journeys became the kind of the fabric of life and what you're saying is that the physical geography really influenced that in very important ways.

Peter Read 

Yes, and as motorcars came in that meant you can get around faster, that obviously changed things but nevertheless, people of Western Sydney are following the old walking tracks laid down by Aboriginal people include the Parramatta Road is one I have on good authority between Sydney CBD, and Parramatta itself as a walking track. And of course, as I said, the Pacific Highway-- I think I said Great Western before sorry, I meant the Pacific Highway, that's the one going north-- that's very much, it's a ridge, there's no other way to go. And the other routes which have been laid out since then they're sort of rather inconvenient, you got to go 60 kilometers an hour all the way or less, because it's so, so hilly and steep and everything else I mean, it's really, really steep many of those areas. So even having a car and a fast car and the train line which go which follows the same route, it follows the ridge down because it would be much too expensive to follow any other route down. And of course then then you have the major river systems have their bridges and Tom Uglys Bridge in the south and the Hawkesbury River Bridge in the north were very major containers of settlement up to the 1910s which is when the bridges were built.

I was trying to think of another question that you're the one how does it affect me a little bit? How does my Aboriginal researchers affect me? I think you said Yeah. Was that question?

Greg Clark 

Yes. That's an interesting question. And we were also asking, how, you know, how is Aboriginal Sydney still visible today?

Peter Read 

Right. Aboriginal Sydney, visible today? Hardly at all. Because the last settlements were destroyed in the-- one was in Katoomba and one was-- this is the large ones of, you know, sort of 20 or 30 people-- and the other one was Narrabeen that Dennis right so feelingly about. And they were all destroyed by 1960s. And they, they only they survived for particular reasons. I think it in Katoomba because it's pretty rough Country and also, it's a big service industry there because of all the hotels, tourist hotels and things. So they needed the Aboriginal community there, they didn't sort of dry them out, and like they're doing in other places. And in a Narrabeen, because was, it was a bit out of sight, the road that goes past there, the freeway, didn't really bypass that part of Narrabeen at all. And you had the Aboriginal people getting on with their lives and selling fish to the white community. But they weren't, they weren't visibly, quote, offensive, unquote. And so they were allowed to stay there until the land became valuable for some other reason. So to answer your question, is it visible anymore? No, I don't think it is except in places like Redfern, in which you've got a large Aboriginal community. And even that's happened kind of accidentally, they represent communities all around the harbor, in the 1960s. Then gradually, they tended to coalesce in Alexandria, and Mascot and Redfern. And once they started to grow, they sort of got a critical mass and got public attention. And people who are living in say Balmain tended go somewhere else altogether. If they thought Redfern was a bit rough was it certainly was a lot of drugs there in the 60s, and public housing. And it was pretty, pretty rough living. And those who didn't want-- there are a lot of police busting into hotels and that kind of thing, and arrests, constantly arrested. Those who didn't like that would move somewhere else. They just went away and had enough of Redfern, go somewhere else. So that's the only visibly Aboriginal area apart from La Perouse. But even then, there's a pretty big mixed population and all sorts of people there. As I said, people like Julie Jansen can say, 'look, I'm a Boorooberongal clan of the Dharug people and, and some of us still live out there.' But Julie is, like many Aboriginal people living out there, you wouldn't look at her and say, 'oh, she's an Aboriginal woman' I do, I can see her Aboriginal features, she's a friend of mine. But other people, their identity is not nearly so obvious. And what gave Aboriginal Sydney region or some particular character, or the Aboriginal inhabitants will have people don't know their Aboriginal now? Well, that distinction is going to be lost.

Greg Clark 

Yes, that very good point, Peter. And of course, something that we as visitors or as scholars don't necessarily come across from this distance. But may I ask you one other question about this idea of whether Aboriginal Sydney is visible. I'm also interested in whether it's visible somehow in the culture or the lifestyle or the way that Sydney works. And let me give you a couple of examples. Obviously, Sydney is still a city that hugely celebrates its water, the harbour, the beaches, the river and everything else. It's also a city where outdoor public gatherings are very popular. It's a city where certain places and spaces are seen as having sort of magnetic qualities. And it's also a city where it plays a very special role in Australia's sort of role in the world as a kind of a gathering place a melting pot, a platform or a stage for engaging beyond Australia. Does any of that, in your mind have resonance in pre-colonial Sydney, in Aboriginal Sydney? Or is it just obviously the way human beings would live? If they're living in that part of the world? I'm wondering, Is any of that a cultural legacy? Or is it just in a sense, an ecological way of living in that space?

Peter Read 

I think more ecological than not. That is if you're, if you're a saltwater person, you're living within Coogee. Yes, that is within comfortable walking distance of the sea. Your sacred places for men will be up high and pretty difficult to have access. But nevertheless, you won't be going too far from the coast, not least because your mythology is tied up with-- you may well be apprehensive of the Blue Mountains and the fierce people or giants or evil spirits that might live there. There's a cultural reason for keeping away from it. But it doesn't mean to say it was all paradise living there. I mean, certainly people, as noted by our early explorers, when times were tough and starvation, particularly in winter, a very early spring for the fish and returned tying a piece of knotted seaweed, probably round their stomachs made it very, very tight to try and assuage the pangs of hunger to some extent. You have very good times, but there were tough times as well. In the Western Sydney, well, of course, people are living very much on yams, which were, which were destroyed by the early settlers. Not because they wanted to destroy them particularly but hard hoofed animals, like horses and goats made a mess of them and any way they made very good agricultural areas until the settlers discovered they flooded regularly as indeed they are at this very moment. So the yam fields don't last long. And so that probably forces the Aboriginal community there into the agricultural workforce. And they're well established by, I mean, 1880 sounds like a long time. But there's Aboriginal men who, they're not proprietors, but they are now in command of all of the technical resources, everything from blacksmiths to fences, to boatman, all the things that non-Aboriginal people are doing, they're doing as well, as they always did. But now, they're still water-men, but they're now pretty good farmers, even growing grapes along the Hawkesbury they've joined the workforce faster probably than the people on the coast did. I'm just flying on the seat of my pants here a bit. Dennis' uncles become fishermen. Well, they always were fishermen. But they're now doing on a commercial basis. They have gotten themselves a net and they've got a truck and they haul the fish in or catch it-- I think they caught it on lines much more commonly, but other people are doing it with a net and going off to the Sydney market to sell it. So ecologically you're being determined where you live and how you live.

And there's the spirituality and the religiosity tends to follow that it's governed by where you find yourself doing in other words, you're the Gamaragal people, according to Dennis, were frightened of the icemen called the ice people think he called them which people probably I think he meant people of the Snowy Mountains. And also they were very wary of the giant people who lived in the Blue Mountains. And even going a little bit further eastward from where he grew up, that is up the towards Castlecrag, not very far from the coast. But he has mythological stories, is women who are kidnapped from Forty Baskets Beach that's just near Manly. And they were taken up the river, up through middle harbor and into areas where they were regarded very dangerous. They're in dangerous areas as the crow flies, it's only it's only 15 kilometers, but it was very rough Country. And even in that short distance, your spirituality and your mythology is being determined, to some extent by the Country, which are all around you.

Greg Clark 

Peter that's very clear and thank you very much for that. So I think you're saying if I've understood that, when you look at modern Sydney with it's sort of on its way to 6 million people in the metropolitan area and all of that. You don't really see people who are not of Aboriginal origin, somehow following Aboriginal ways of living. What you see instead is a kind of physical legacy of waterways, tracks and everything else that have been, you know, used over many 1000s of years. And they still provide the kind of backdrop for the modern city. But you don't see somehow, you know, people who've come from other parts of the world, doing things that Aboriginal people did in the past or congregating in ways that they did. All of that is just a feature of geography rather than inherited culture.

Peter Read 

That's right. But inherited, you can bring your inherited culture with you. So you got Vietnamese, settling on the Georges River and fishing in traditional ways, and even beginning to form their own narrow, traditional narratives of how the river came into being. Mythologising the Georges River after a couple of generations and living there in a way that non-Aboriginal people are sorry that white people don't do any fishing is only commercial fishing. And you can't do that in Sydney anyway very much anymore because it's polluted so no one's no one's relying on the Sydney fishing waters for fishing in any kind of serious way. I think I'm right in saying now. But the traditional fishing communities like the Southeast Asians have taken to the Georges River. They're not fishing commercially, but they do a lot of fishing nevertheless, to feed their families. And they as I said they're beginning to mythologise a river themselves.

Greg Clark 

Yeah, so there's a kind of a repetitive ecological relationship that that fosters similarities in terms of mythology.

Peter Read 

In the Pacific people have very close mythological relations with the sea and islands and getting around which coverage presumably without being too much of a structuralist, after some extent, determined by the lifestyle, which you don't have to adopt it. But it's the only it's the most sensible and labor-saving lifestyle that you can adopt.

Greg Clark 

Peter, is it okay to ask you the question now, the other way round? Because I think you might have some insights here, which is that if you just put to the background, all of this amazing work that you've done on Aboriginal Sydney and just ask the question, what is the DNA of Sydney as you see it as Sydney as a city? What is it that makes it unique, distinctive, differentiated, you've already said quite a lot about the geography, and in particular, the topography. But are there other things that you would say about that?

Peter Read 

Well, this is a personal thing. I mean, Sydney is my city. I grew up here. I've been living in Canberra for about 40 odd years. I grew up in Sydney, and I'm still there a lot and one of my daughters, and her family lives there, too in Lilyfield. I couldn't have done a history of Aboriginal Melbourne. I wouldn't have been here wouldn't have touched me. And it still doesn't, Melbourne doesn't touch me. No, no Australian city really touches me like Sydney does. And you hear a lot about Sydney Harbour and have that water attraction and all that sort of stuff. Well, yeah, that's nice, but it doesn't really-- that hasn't affected me. What has affected me probably is my work in Aboriginal Sydney with the Aboriginal part of it certainly in just extending my feeling for how many millennia people have done that same thing in that same place. I mean, Dennis has been for Northern Sydney around the northern side of the harbour, Dennis has been a wonderful informant for me. He could describe the railway bridges during the Depression near Allendale really, Wentworth Park was a large community living there. I can't go over that railway now without thinking of depression communities, which we're not all Aboriginal by any means. They're all depression communities. I don't know how well you know, Sydney when I go through what's your it's really just sort of just sort of Lilyfield actually, there's a row of what used to be railway marshalling yards. And now it's all been taken over by the trains. They've all disappeared in the last four or five years or so. And Dennis pointed out the Aboriginal families that used to live in there, along with other homeless people, but they will live there. Along near Glebe, I can't go to any of those places now. And I'm there regularly, and I can never get out of my mind. I'm not making a social judgment saying poor people or lucky people or anything. I'm just aware that he was here we're human beings living there in a way that's been forgotten now except by people of my age and Dennis's age.

Auntie Fran has walked us all around the Botanical Gardens part of Sydney Harbour in part of Georges River pointing out how she grew up as a kid, and what she used to do, and however, people in the past used to live, I don't know that part of Southern Sydney so well, it affects me in in the same way of thinking through a continuity. So my Sydney itself is I suppose like most people, my DNA of Sydney is all the places that I know and hang out in. And I can't say loved exactly, but been associated with, you know, Freshwater Beach, Harbord Beach my mum used to take me there. So even though I haven't been back for a long time, it's always a special place that I used to go with my mum used to drive us down before I could drive. Newport where we used to have holidays, Warrawee, Wahroonga, where I used to go to school, Lindfield where I grew up and all the shops there. It's a great game I play with my wife and various other people who used to grow up there. 'What are all the shops there? In 1950s? Name all the shops... No, that wasn't there! No, no, yes, it is, it's still there, you're gonna have a look!' you know what the conversation like you've probably played that game yourself. Really, when you've been there a long time or grew up there. There's a very intense locality. If you care about place, not everybody does not, not everybody should. But for somebody like me, to whom places are very, very important, just born like that. And I was, though these places remain important to me. As an street in Killara called Fiddens Wharf Road well, the age of 12, 'what's it called that for?' hopped on my bike went over there and then discovered it was a big wharf of timber getting in the 1820s/30s along the Lane Cove River. So a lot of my junior, my very early explorations as a child were done locating places. So I have a particular viewpoint of locating history in the place of which I am very familiar with and have very fond affectionate memories of and, and the reason why my memories of them are deepened and strengthened because of my knowledge of what happened before, I was wondering what used to happen here before and when I got Aboriginal people or even elderly ladies who used to live there anyway, saying 'this is what we used to do' that very much deepened my central place, and makes it more special for me. And I'm very sad if these things disappear.

Greg Clark 

Peter, this is a brilliant answer. What I've just heard you describe is that one of the things that really draws you to Sydney is this compelling sense of place that's formed increasingly and dynamically by your understanding of the history created the place and underpins it? And, you know, it's almost like you have a calling to these places where there's a kind of deep set of memories that you can uncover and that either in your present life as one man, you're intellectually resourcing some kind of memory capability through your research that's leading you to have this this deep relationship with it. And I suppose then, firstly, I salute you for your commitment to that because I'm sure that what is now happening is that everybody who reads your work, is now sharing this deep sense of the history that came before the current history, whatever it was, and your being attuned to that serves a purpose that's bigger than your own enrichment. It's the enrichment of other people's sense of place in history. So the question the question I have is, whether you think that in Sydney, because of the Aboriginal history and its richness, and its huge length of time, is it a place where somehow people are conscious where every everybody is consciously or unconsciously sort of influenced by that history. And some people like yourself become conscious investigators into that. But is it your view that everybody is somehow influenced by this this magnetic pool that the history creates? Or is it simply some people are conscious? And some people are not?

Peter Read 

Yeah, well, I don't think that that's true. But also it depends on your what your personal history has been, and how long it's been. And whether your relatives have been there as well. I should say it's not only Aboriginal because I've had many discussions about where the Chinese Market Gardens were on the North Shore. I love that. I love to know about that. And I'm always asking people, where were they? Where did it end? What happened to all those people? Where did they sell it? What were their grandkid? Why did they grow oranges and not lemons? Or said well, they grow citrus and veggies, etc? I'm a bugger for the past. I really am. That's why I'm a historian, I suppose. And you start talking about contemporary problems of Sydney. I have to say, I'm not as interested in them as I were in the 1930s.

Greg Clark 

But it seems to me you are interested in helping everyone become a bit more conscious of the history?

Peter Read 

Yeah, well, I want to share that if they if they do that. Well, terrific.