Sydney: Australia's original stories

At the opening of this month's Corroboree Festival in Sydney, the Gurung Parade by Aboriginal children and Firelighting Festival is a crowd-puller.

Catherine Smith gets acquainted - or tries to - with modern Sydney's original Australians, whose cultures are undergoing rediscovery.

Cultural tourism can be awkward, especially for New Zealanders. In our collective memories we know that the first tourists to our country in the 19th century were drawn here by the curiosity of "exotic Maori" living in romantic forests and lakes. Local iwi showing off their Pink and White Terraces and Waitomo Caves were our earliest tourism entrepreneurs.

As we are never ones to pass up a chance to bag our Aussie neighbours, we particularly like to snort about how non-existent the stories and places of the Aboriginal first nations are in their key tourist towns - Uluru excepted, that is.

But one of my favourite Kiwi travel myths was put to shame by a recent exploration of urban Aboriginal culture in Sydney.

Young Willy (surnames not necessary on this tour group) led the Rocks Dreaming Aboriginal Heritage Tour. Although he is only a recent city transplant from Newcastle, with family roots with the freshwater people of central New South Wales, he was casually handing out survival advice for this most urban spot.

Next time I am being chased by a knot of snakes, I now know to head straight for a clump of casuarina trees, and wait things out. Apparently, snakes don't like the prickly spikes of this native she-oak on their bellies.

We could also relieve our thirst by chewing the stems of plants he pointed out - way better than the expensive bottled water being flogged at The Rocks' tackier tourist shops.

Willy's mini-demonstration of rock painting, mouth-spraying clay paint on to his hand stencil on the ancient walls, is done beneath a thundering motorway overpass.

Thanks to Willy, Clarence Slockee, educator at the Royal Botanic Garden, and Hetti Perkins, creative director of Sydney's first ever modern corroboree, my eyes were opened to the depth and vibrancy of Sydney's Aboriginal community.

I don't envy Slockee his job, trying to summarise 40,000 years of history, over 250 nations and language groups, using plants from all over the Australian continent, into a captivating two-hour walk through the garden.

Our group ranged from partying ex-pats from the Middle East to an art professor, but Slockee patiently paused while we tasted berries and leaves. He sensitively handled personal questions about clan structures, his own family practices and previous career as a dancer with the country's foremost indigenous arts company, Bangarra, even giving a haunting performance on the didgeredoo.

My travel companion, an American culture and religion writer, and I quickly learned not to try couching the complexities of Aboriginal stories, totems or family structures in Western terms. It really did feel like a whole other world.

Since Slockee's people are from Bunjala ("up North, the saltwater people"), he was permitted to talk only in general terms about the local Cadigal stories. My notes were a jumble of terms that will require a lifetime to begin to understand. If ever.

Frustratingly for me, neither of the male guides could venture into stories about "women's business", explaining that they are the wrong gender, or from a different territory or language nation. So I was lucky to strike the final weeks of two exciting exhibitions at the beautifully refurbished Museum of Contemporary Art: String Theory, textile and craft-based works from a diverse range of artists, many of them women's collectives, telling some of the women's stories.

A video work, Embedded: Craig Walsh, showed moving portraits of men and women from Pilbara talking about their country and the historic rock art against the backdrop of that extraordinary red country.

At the Art Gallery of NSW, it was exciting to compare the colonial art of the 1820s (depicting, somewhat deceptively arcadian green scenes) with the spectacular sculptures and bark pieces from Arnhemland in the Yiribana Gallery.

It is one of the largest spaces for indigenous art and sculpture, yet collecting First Nation pieces as art - not "primitive" artefacts - only began as recently as 1959.

The Black Arts Market is also a crowd-puller. Photo / Supplied

Pieces, modern and old, are so understood to be a nation's storytelling that all the galleries carry signs warning Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders that they may be upset by stories or images of dead ancestors.

Though most of the hundreds of ancient rock carvings around the city are protected and sacred, the cliff paths from Bondi Beach to Tamarama Bay has one of the most accessible carvings of a shark.

But Aboriginal tourism is still less well developed than it should be. According to Destination New South Wales, only three per cent of total domestic overnight visitors to the state engage in an Aboriginal activity on their trip (around 19 per cent of international visitors are curious).

Hetti Perkins, daughter of famous activist Charlie Perkins, pulled together the first modern Corroboree Sydney Festival to bring "our mob" (her words) together with the general, non-Aboriginal public.

Last year's event featured dance, art and theatre, plus a Black Arts Market, heritage walks and even an elders' circle for seniors, particularly excited to share their stories.

To this outsider it seemed like the festival was revealing things that were invisible, but right under Sydneysiders' noses. It returns this month with more than 100 artists performing over 11 days.

Highlights include the opening Gurung ("child" in the Sydney Eora language) Parade, a procession of 3000 schoolchildren carrying home-made waratahs to share, a Firelight ceremony (the fire burns through the festival) and a free two-day outdoor show, Homeland, at Sydney Opera House plus Bangarra Dance Theatre's 25th anniversary celebrations.

The festival line-up includes a programme designed for teachers and their students.

In addition, the Festival features many free family events including a paper canoe-making workshop at the Australian National Maritime Museum (November 29-30).

Find out more ...

• Pick up a City of Sydney Barani Barrabugu Yesterday Tomorrow brochure, a self-guided walking tour of important Aboriginal history sites. Includes archaeological finds, points of early contact through to the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s, performing arts and more. Much of it clustered around the suburb of Redfern.

• The Museum of Sydney, one of the 12 Sydney Living Museums, has a small space devoted to the Cadigal people. Much of it focuses on the first fleets and early contact, but it gives a brief overview of early contact experience, with bush food, tools and stories.

• The Australian Museum's collection of artefacts is the country's oldest and richest collection. Museum of Sydney, cnr Phillip and Bridge Sts.

• Royal Botanic Garden Sydney Aboriginal Heritage Tour: bookings essential. $36.50 per head; $16.50 student/child. Mrs Macquaries Rd Sydney.

• artgallery.nsw.gov.au

• Corroboree Sydney November 20-30.

• Bangarra, the professional dance company, intersects ancient stories of traditional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities with contemporary stories, songs and dances.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Air New Zealand flies direct to Sydney from Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Queenstown and Rotorua, with flights also on alliance partner Virgin Australia.

Further information: See sydney.com for more on Aboriginal cultural activities in Sydney.

The writer travelled as a guest of Destination New South Wales.