Many Aboriginal rock engraving sites can be found along the coast of Sydney, several of which are across the cliff edges of Bondi. Rock engravings were a common form of artwork used around Coastal Sydney, as a way of teaching, potential boundary markings and to show the sources of food within the area. Coastal Sydney people such as Cora Gooseberry and Johnny Baswick’s son Freddy continued to hold knowledge of engravings in the 19th century and these places are still very important to Aboriginal people today.

There are rock engravings to the north and south of Bondi Beach that you can see. At north Bondi Beach is an engraving of one side of a whale and a turtle, and a small distance away two shields and an eel can be found. To the south of Bondi Beach at Marks Park, Tamarama, is an engraving of a six-meter-long shark with a fish inside the shark and a fish along the side.

The whale engraving is significant to Aboriginal people belonging to the Coastal Sydney cultural area. We have a significant cultural connection to the ocean life and in particular our spirit ancestor the buriburi, which in Dharawal language means humpback whale.

Our old people said, we know where buriburi and his descendants have been because of the islands that are made in our country. Islands in Sydney Harbour, like Clarke Island, and others in Botany Bay and the Shoalhaven, were made by burburi.

Over time, buriburi and then his descendants thinking that they found their lost barangga (meaning ‘large vessel’ in Dharawal language), they went around it, made it deeper, then realised it wasn’t theirs and off they’d go again spurting water out the top of their heads.

Stories like this allow us to understand the world through our spiritual lens. For us knowledge is abstract and theoretical, we’re able to apply spiritual reasoning as a matter of logic, spiritual reasoning is therefore logic for us.

This story was told to current community members when they were young, by senior Dharawal women. It was told to them in the early 1900s by people who lived under full kinship lore, including in camps throughout Coastal Sydney.

Courtesy the Gujaga Foundation.