Chapters → Settlement and dispossession – Hornsby Heights, from the 1790s to the 1970s
Kurt Iveson
Settlement and dispossession – Hornsby Heights, from the 1790s to the 1970s
Kurt Iveson
When I was four, my parents and I moved from a rented apartment in Rose Bay to a newly built house in Hornsby Heights, in the northern suburbs of Sydney. Like hundreds of other families who came to settle in that area, my parents had purchased the land and house from developers, after the land was released for residential development by the Land Commission of NSW (Landcom). Our little cul-de-sac was about 400 metres away from the boundary where suburbia met the bush – this particular land release stuck to the top of a ridge extending between two creek valleys that were left undeveloped.
Figure 1. Aboriginal Rock Engravings, Hornsby Heights
All of my childhood memories are bound up with that house and neighbourhood. There were a bunch of other kids on our street, and as we got older, we spent countless hours playing in the nearby bushland. On one sandstone ledge in that bush, there is a group of Aboriginal rock engravings (Figure 1). I guess as kids we thought we’d ‘discovered’ these engravings – even though there was a small sign there installed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service pointing out their existence. The ledge offered brilliant views of the valley, and the presence of the engravings made it an amazing place for play – we would invent all sorts of scenarios that somehow wove the engravings into the story, as we imagined the lives of the people who had made them (Figure 2).
My parents still live in the same house, and that part of Sydney still feels like home. There’s a special kind of peace that I only seem to find when I’m surrounded by that bush, that I haven’t really experienced anywhere else. This place is also an incredibly important part of my family’s story. For my parents, it represented the kind of amenity and security that they’d never experienced, growing up in public housing in different parts of the world.
But it turns out this place of peace and security for me and my family is also a contested place. This was a surprise to me, even though it shouldn’t have been – after all, evidence of the prior occupation of the land where my family settled was literally engraved in the sandstone. But a little digging into the history of this place revealed a story that demonstrates how dispossession is an on-going process in settler colonial Sydney.
Figure 2. Views from the sandstone ledge
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Looking back now on the pictures that were taken while our house was being built (Figure 3), and viewing them through the lens of contemporary discussions about settler colonial cities, it’s immediately apparent that the colonial settlement of land in Sydney was not a single moment in the 1790s – it was continuing in the 1970s. Land on the urban fringe was (and still is) being carved up into properties for sale. Blocks were being cleared, houses were being built, infrastructures were (gradually) being extended. None of this was done with any acknowledgement of that land being anything other than ‘empty’, let alone with any compensation for the land’s original occupants.
Figure 3. Me and my mum during the construction of our house
Figure 4. A rusty frame for the sign indicating the presence of rock engravings
A few years ago, I took my own kids down to the bush to show them the engravings. I’d hoped to find the sign that I remembered, wondering what it might tell us about the original occupants of the land. The carvings were where I’d remembered them, but the sign was gone – the only evidence of its existence a rusted frame (Figure 4).
After that visit, I decided to see what I could find out about the Guringai people and Aboriginal occupation of this part of Sydney. This research turned up an unexpected and troubling set of events that had taken place in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
By the mid 1990s, thousands of blocks of land in Hornsby Heights, and in nearby Asquith and Berowra, had been developed into suburban housing. But Landcom was still in possession of over 500 more blocks that had not yet been released for sale – all blocks that would extend the suburbs further into the surrounding bushland. It began to make plans for further land sales and development.
When locals got wind of these plans, there was a mobilisation against any further development. Members of a community that occupied bushland developed in the 1970s now stood opposed to any future land releases, which they believed would threaten the environment. When bulldozers arrived to start clearing bush in preparation for sale, they were confronted with a crowd of people blocking their way.[28]
In the face of this opposition, development was halted. Working together with Hornsby Shire Council, Landcom commissioned the Total Environmental Centre to conduct a review into Ecologically Sustainable Development in the area. That review recommended that no further housing be developed, in order to protect the wildlife corridors and biodiversity supported by the valleys. Landcom accepted most of the recommendations of the review, and withdrew all but 34 lots from redevelopment.
But the story does not end here. The 1983 NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act gives Aboriginal Land Councils the right to claim unused Crown Lands. Unlike the Commonwealth Native Title legislation that was to follow much later, the NSW Act has no requirement for Aboriginal people to prove on-going occupation of the land in order to support a successful claim. However, there are other important restrictions. They include that the lands in question:
are not lawfully used or occupied,
do not comprise lands which,in the opinion of a Crown Lands
Minister, are needed or are likely to be needed as residential
lands,
are not needed, nor likely to be needed, for an essential public
purpose.[29]
So, when Landcom decided not to develop the contested lots for housing, the NSW and Metro ALCs used their rights under the Act to lodge 13 land claims for parcels of unused Crown Land stretching from Hornsby Heights to Berowra Heights. The residents who had mobilised against Landcom now mobilised their opposition to these land claims, arguing that the disputed land should be added to the Berowra Valley Regional Park, which was co-managed by Hornsby Shire Council and the Minister for the Environment. They were supported by the Council, who used the Total Environment Centre’s ESD report on the area to support their position.
In 2000, the Minister rejected the Land Claim, on the grounds that “the land claimed was needed, likely to be needed, used, or occupied for an essential public purpose, ie as residential lands, or for nature conservation”. This decision was appealed, and so the matter entered the grindingly slow legal system. The standing of the NSW and Metro ALCs to appeal the decision was upheld in a Land and Environment Court decision in 2008, but the Court did not hear the case itself at that time. The Minister appealed this decision, and his appeal was rejected in a decision by the NSW Court of Appeals in 2009. At that point, the trail goes cold. As far as I can tell, this substantive appeal has still not been heard, over a decade after this initial decision, and almost 20 years after the initial claim was lodged in 2000.[30] It joins literally tens of thousands of Land Council claims waiting to be determined years after they have been lodged, in a process that is so hopeless that it is systematically denying Aboriginal people their rights under the Act. [31]
In 2012, the NSW Government transferred management of the Berowra Valley Regional Park to the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Incredibly, in justifying the Bill which amended the National Parks and Wildlife Act, then Minister for the Environment stated that the creation of a National Park would provide “a more appropriate level of environmental and cultural protection”, that would “protect the special conservation and community values of this area” – including 24 “known sites of Aboriginal cultural heritage”.[32] There was no mention in her speech that this preservation of Aboriginal heritage came on the back of over a decade of Government opposition to an Aboriginal land claim over the area.
This episode repeats conflicts that have happened all over Sydney, in which Local and State Governments have actively sought either to prevent Aboriginal Land Councils from making claims on urban land, and/or to restrict the property rights of ALCs to actually develop land that they have successful claimed through the Act. [33]
And so, we find ourselves in the deeply unjust situation in Sydney whereby the State that has enacted settlement and dispossession, in combination with some of the residents who have benefited from that dispossession by purchasing land and houses, have actively sought to prevent the extension of property rights to Aboriginal people who they have dispossessed. And they have done so, at least in part, on the grounds that their action would preserve Aboriginal cultural heritage!
As Naama Blatman-Thomas and Libby Porter have written:
the process of ‘settling’ Indigenous lands is contemporary, persistent and present. Settler colonialism is still creating its spaces. Today, the violence of the urban frontier is refracted through increasingly marketized formations, pertaining especially to limited forms of recognition of Indigenous rights in the land.[34]
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Visiting the engravings again with my kids not too long ago, one of them climbed down the ledge and started exploring the bush. A few minutes later, they let out an excited scream – they had found the sign that I’d remembered. It was rusted and weathered but still readable (Figure 5). We tried our best to put it back in place. Part of it reads:
Australian Aborigines made these rock engravings. They help us to understand a way of life which is now past. Once destroyed they cannot be replaced.
Figure 5. “We found the sign!” National Parks and Wildlife Sign at Aboriginal Rock Engravings, Hornsby Heights
The sign, likely written sometime in the 1970s, seeks to put Aboriginal people and their possession of the land where I grew up firmly in the past. The decision to convert this land into National Park in 2012 similarly privileged a form of heritage that located Aboriginal culture in the past, not the present. But the recent conflict over Aboriginal land claims in this area shows that dispossession is still in motion, and still being contested by Aboriginal peoples whose struggle for recognition and rights continues.
How should non-indigenous urban dwellers in Sydney and beyond, like me and my family, be dealing with this? There are no easy answers. But there’s surely an urgent obligation for those of us concerned with urban social justice to acknowledge our complicity in dispossession, to stop getting in the way of land claims that are possible within the limitations of the existing land rights regime, and to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their struggle for an expansion of the scope of these regimes. To be truly just, those regimes have to be underpinned by a Treaty that rights the wrongs of terra nullius and overturns the denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty that continues to be the foundation of the Australian nation and its state.
28 See http://friendsberowravalley.org.au/html/urban_development.html
29 See NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 36(1)(b), (b1) and (c).
30 See New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council & Metropolitan Aboriginal Land Council v Minister Administering the Crown Lands Act [2008] NSW Land and Environment Court, NSWLEC 241, and Minister Administering the Crown Lands Act v New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council & Anor [2009] NSWCA 352.
31 A couple of years after this essay was originally written, the Audit Office of NSW released a report finding over 38,000 of the 53,000 Land Claims made since 1983 were still waiting to be deter- mined. See https://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/our-work/reports/facilitat- ing-and-administering-aboriginal-land-claim-processes
32 See NSW Legislative Council Hansard, 9 May 2012, First read- ing speech by Robyn Parker, Minister for the Environment.
33 See Miers, S. (2018) The Effect of Land Use Planning Decisions on the Landholdings and Viability of NSW Local Aboriginal Land Councils, Henry Halloran Trust.
34 See Blatman-Thomas and Porter (2019) ‘Placing Property: Theo- rising the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 43(1), p. 31.