The best stories are always powerful, proud and local, like Yarns Parai. Google it. The exhibition launches soon at the Lake Macquarie Art Gallery. It is a remarkable project. It pioneers ways of telling Aboriginal stories of country. In local Indigenous languages, Parai means country.
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The Yarns Parai project is very unusual. It was undertaken as part of the search by Transport NSW for a corridor through the lower Hunter for a new railway line for freight. Local Aboriginal people were consulted about potential impacts. Yarns Parai assembles the stories that Aboriginal people tell about the country a freight line might eventually pass through.
The need for a new freight route is obvious. The daily meandering of freight trains through suburban Newcastle and Lake Macquarie is a section of a long running comedy we call the Newcastle to Sydney railway line. Finding a better lower Hunter corridor was promised by NSW Liberal premier Mike Baird in 2014. No rush.
There are good reasons to find a new corridor. Freight rail is noisy, smelly and unsightly in many contexts. Setting aside a corridor minimises exorbitant spending on land acquisition. Otherwise, the list of engineering projects needed to minimise impacts on other land uses, especially residential, is endless.
Most of the information about the proposed corridor is contained in a 157-page environmental assessment by global engineering consultants GSP. The document explains the proposed route and details potential impacts on the physical environment and on existing human interests.
One category of impact is Aboriginal heritage. This section of the GSP report reads much like any other engineering report on Aboriginal heritage. It finds that the impact of a corridor on Aboriginal heritage would be minimal. It makes this judgement after close examination of pre-existing records of Aboriginal artefacts, archaeological evidence of Aboriginal heritage sites, and the location of Aboriginal land claims. The assessment is rational, competent and thorough, at least from an engineering point of view, which is the problem. Have you heard an engineer tell a yarn?
In contrast, the appraisal of the corridor in Yarns Parai comes from another world, from a people with a rich history of storytelling, where science and culture, the past and the future, fold into each other. Yarns Parai is everything that the report of a global engineering company isn't. It tells the stories of local Awabakal country, not just of artefacts but of the presence of Aboriginal people in this country for tens of thousands of years.
The stories come from a team led by University of Newcastle Professor of Indigenous History, John Maynard. On the team are Saretta Fielding, John Hancock, Ray Kelly Jnr, Josh Gilbert and Karen Iles. The team draws on oral and written histories, interviews with local Aboriginal elders and their communities, and a stash of historic, photographic and legal documents.
The stories are on the Transport NSW corridor site. They tell of the three prominent landscapes the corridor will traverse as it crosses Aboriginal country: Hexham Swamp, Mount Sugarloaf and Lake Macquarie. The stories tell of significant places and passages, journey tracks, marriage sites, hunting and camping spots and of the spirit world that is all around.
Saretta Fielding's art works make the stories compelling. Fielding tells me she re-interpreted the colours and shapes of the contour maps of the landscapes along the corridor and enlivened them with traditional representations of gathering circles, waterholes, creek systems, initiation sites and the like. Professor Maynard tells me of rich documentary material underpinning Yarns Parai, especially the extraordinary chronicling in the 1830s of local Aboriginal languages by the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld and local Aboriginal leader and scholar, Biraban.
When you read Yarns Parai you get a sense of something extraordinary. Most of what can be read about Aboriginal presence in the Hunter is about the contact years, the brutal dispossession of country by the British colonists. One unfortunate consequence of these important histories is a feeling that Aboriginal presence in the Hunter has been devastated, forever. Yarns Parai changes this view. It is a celebration of Aboriginal country all around us - and to think a train corridor study brought it to life.
It is a celebration of Aboriginal country all around us - and to think a train corridor study brought it to life.