Walking with Dyarubbin Part I: Shaws Creek and Yarramundi

I woke this morning eager to explore Dharug Country and discover more of what Dyarubbin—the Hawkesbury River—offers. My day began at the Hawkesbury Museum, where I explored 11 Stories from the River Dyarubbin. Through recorded voices, histories and music, the project shares stories connected to eleven locations between Yarramundi and Sackville. I eagerly took notes on each location, building on the research I had already gathered through the Dyarubbin mapping project. The river was beginning to take shape in my mind as a landscape of connected places, each with its own stories and significance.

With the GoPro charged, I picked up my friend Josh and we headed out to explore and take photographs. Our first stop was Burugal, Shaws Creek Aboriginal Place. It was a beautiful setting, with casuarina trees—gumin—lining the river and noticeably rocky ground beneath our feet. Our walk was approximately two kilometres return, giving us time to appreciate the majestic river and spend a little longer in the landscape I had been reading about.

One detail from my research stayed with me as we walked: oral histories record Aboriginal women fishing along Dyarubbin and collecting mussels until at least 1948. That date brought the history closer. Looking across the water, I thought about the women who had gathered food here and along the river, and the knowledge involved in understanding its currents, seasons and resources. The casuarinas and riverbank gave me something tangible to connect with those accounts, while reminding me how much there is still to learn from the people whose histories belong to this Country.

Our next stop was Yarramundi, where the Grose and Nepean rivers meet, and the Hawkesbury continues downstream. I had learned about its importance as a meeting place, ceremonial ground, and tool-making site. The State Library’s Dyarubbin account describes Gundungurra people travelling along the Nepean, Darkinjung people through the Grose, and Dharug people along Dyarubbin to gather for ceremony, trade, food and resources. Standing there, I began to picture the waterways as routes connecting people and places across the surrounding Country.

The stones along the river also took on greater significance. My research described people collecting riverbed pebbles to make stone implements, and Yarramundi’s heritage report identifies workable stone among the gravel and cobble deposits. What might first appear to be an ordinary rocky riverbank was also a source of materials and skilled work. Learning this changed how I looked at the ground beneath my feet and the resources held within the landscape.

The Yarramundi audio walk brings together stories of fish traps, songlines, platypus and the river’s ecology, alongside the later history of farming and sand and gravel mining. These were subjects I had encountered in my notes, and visiting the place gave them a setting. I did not see every feature or animal described, but knowing something of those stories made me more attentive to the water, the banks and the ways the landscape has changed over time.

Walking on Country today, exploring these two places along Dyarubbin, deepened my appreciation of the river’s power and significance. I had begun the morning gathering information; by the afternoon, I was starting to connect that information with the experience of being there. There is much more for me to understand about the histories and continuing relationships held along its banks. For today, I was grateful to walk, look and begin to listen. Through these places of gathering, work, ceremony and memory, the great river keeps flowing. As it meanders past, it just rolls on by.