Crocodile rock map of Australia speaks volumes

Tom Gosling 15 January 2024 The Spectator Australia

There’s an image that appears in my mind’s eye whenever people start talking about Australia Day.

It’s a big sandstone rock, shaped like a grey crocodile’s snout, projecting out into dense green bushland.

It was one of our favourite places back in the 1950s when we lived in the Sydney suburb of Sylvania, which, as its name implies, had lots of trees.

Before it was overwhelmed by suburban sprawl, Sylvania was a wonderful place for kids to roam around, explore and play all day.

Like Christopher Robin at Pooh Corner, we had our own names for geographical features – Rum Jungle was what we called the swamp where the famous Sylvania Waters was later built, and the Little White Bridge was, well, a little white bridge.

The Jet Tree had a sloping trunk we could run up shaped exactly like the wings of the jet fighters that were then fighting in Korea and Crocodile Rock, well blow me down, it looked like a crocodile!

Crocodile Rock had a dozen or so Aboriginal carvings on it – a boomerang, a kangaroo, people, stuff like that – even a map of Australia.

Oops, did I say a map of Australia?

Yes, there it was, as clear as day, a carving that even as kids we suspected was of no great antiquity, and probably not from the days when the Original People lived in our bush backyard.

Why not? For the simple reason that the Original People had no idea of the shape of Australia until Europeans arrived.

From the top of Crocodile Rock, we could see, through the trees, Botany Bay where Cook arrived in 1770, briefly explored, and left.

But even the master cartographer didn’t know whether New Holland (Western Australia) and New South Wales were connected.

That fact wasn’t established until 1803, when Matthew Flinders achieved the amazing feat of circumnavigating the continent in a 33-metre converted collier,?The Investigator.

Among Flinders’ crew were two Aboriginal men, Bungaree and Nanbaree, who helped the expedition significantly by negotiating with local tribes when Flinders needed to go ashore.

After Flinders published his findings in?A Voyage to Terra Australis?(1814),?Europeans and Aboriginals alike rapidly absorbed the knowledge that they lived on the world’s largest island.

The memory I treasure the most from the few years we lived in Sylvania was the love we had for the bush. We roamed through it all day wearing just shorts and our feet became rock-hard.

We got so tanned that one of my Granny’s visitors remarked one day that we looked like ‘little Abos’. People said things like that in those days. And it was accurate enough, because we felt like little Original People.

Something about the Australian bush, the smell of the sandstone and eucalypts, the mangroves and the cliff lines, reached into our souls and imparted a deep love of country. Australia,?mon amour.

We couldn’t get enough of the bush. We did our best to get lost on Sunday mornings to avoid having to go to a weatherboard building where old people in funny clothes sang out of tune and a preacher talked about some forlorn character who got strung up in the Middle East.

The map of Australia was familiar to us from the coloured plastic templates we were given at school to draw maps in our exercise books, with holes where you could poke your pencil through to mark the state borders.

This was a shape that the Original People, for all their brilliance in adapting to and living from this beautiful country, and for all their deep spiritual connection to flora, fauna, land, water and sky, never worked out.

Over tens of thousands of years, the Original People travelled long distances – moving from their own tribal areas to others, with neighbourly permission, but in the main, they returned to their ancestral territories after their peregrinations.

They had trade networks over the whole continent and beyond, but they didn’t have the map-making skills to create an outline, or indeed a concept of a place called Australia. For them, the world was mainly somewhere you could walk to.

It wasn’t until the Europeans – more specifically Matthew Flinders – that there came to be an Australia.

That’s why we call it Australia Day. And why we should continue to call it Australia Day.

It is right and proper to celebrate the European achievement of arriving here and using European skills to map the continent’s outline.

The way I see it, it would also be right and proper to have a national holiday to celebrate the earlier settlement and careful stewardship of the great southern land by the Original People.

To get things in their proper order, it could perhaps be the day before Australia Day. First things first.

Original People’s Day could be an opportunity for us all to learn more about the spiritual connection to country that lay at the heart of the longest continuous civilisation of any nation on Earth.

And to learn more about the tragic massacres that took place as European settlement expanded in all directions, with the heart torn out of the traditional way of life and thousands upon thousands of innocent people slain in the most brutal of ways.

Alternatively, there could perhaps be a national holiday at some stage during NAIDOC week, in the middle of the year.

Whatever, we are right these days to be paying greater respect to the descendants of those people whose home it was before Europe and the rest of the world arrived.

In some ways, we new settlers are still discovering Australia. We’ve cleared the land, built towns and roads and cities, exploited and enjoyed the country’s bounty, but we’ve largely missed the real treasure – the people.

That has been our loss. Instead of having futile guilt trips about Australia Day, we Johnny-come-latelies should be getting to know our Original People better, and vice versa. It can only reward us to do so.

And instead of lamentations, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments the black armband crew should remember, Australia is here to be enjoyed.

AUTHOR Tom Gosling