Celebrating 100 Indigenous UNSW Law Graduates 100-Indigenous-Law-Graduates-Event_Booklet_V13_FIN | Page 35

35
Military garrisons were established to claim territory from local
tribes who contested being alienated from their traditional
lands. Grave sites were recently uncovered near UNSW during
excavations for the Sydney Light Rail project illustrating the impact
of colonisation on local clans.
The human population around the campus area grew enormously
between the late 1800s and early 1900s as a tram line was
extended to the new Kensington racecourse. Europeans settled
most of the land previously occupied by local clans whose
numbers had been decimated by smallpox and frontier conflicts.
Fig.6 La Perouse Aboriginal mission 1927
Aboriginal people gathered these foods using implements of wood,
stone, bone and shell, such as fish hooks, multi-pronged fishing
spears, barbed hunting spears, wooden clubs and shields, non-
returning boomerangs, ground stone axes, vessels of wood and bark
and woven net bags.
Way of life for coastal Aboriginal tribes around Sydney changed
dramatically with the arrival of the British. UNSW main campus is
situated in a region that was the epicentre of dispossession. While the
nature of the settlement/invasion of Australia is contested because
the laws of settlement for this time are murky, the first nations at the
national constitutional convention at Uluru in 2017 decided to label
it an “invasion”. British arrivals fought with the Aboriginal people for
territory, setting up outposts in and around Kensington (fig. 5).
Fig.7 Aerial photo showing the location of UNSW campus, 1930
From the early twentieth century, government policies restricted
Aboriginal movement, and most coastal Sydney people came to live
on the La Perouse Aboriginal mission (fig. 6). This was the period of
segregation or otherwise known as ‘protection’.