Transcript

Botany Bay is one of twenty five Environmental and Zoo Education Centres in New South Wales, located at Kurnell within Kamay Botany Bay National Park.

Botany Bay EEC supports Aboriginal education for all students. We work with our local Aboriginal community, the department, Aboriginal education and well-being team and our local AECG. This film supports the importance of the bark canoes that were sighted in 1770 in Botany Bay.

I'm a cultural teacher, in the same way as my brother Dean. We had to live and breathe our culture at an early age. Just carrying on some of the things that my father taught me and my mother was an artist. She taught me how to paint and my father told me the stories.

So I'm painting my mother and father stories and different designs now in life. This is part of rekindling the fire to go back to the proper way of building Nawis, bark canoes, to see who gives us an opportunity to return back in time, return back in history. It's the oldest craft in the world.

Look at the canoe. We're using stringy bark trees at the moment as our methods of getting it off the tree. We're skinning the bark off and trying to leave a little bit on the tree, so the tree survives. We're doing the right thing, we're carrying on culture.

So there's a process that we go through culturally, that's important, that's about respect. Before we even go near a tree we've got to ask permission, from that land and them old spirits. Whoever we're teaching also understands that we can't just go in there and grab whatever we want, it's not ours, you know, it's there to keep us alive and work with us and live with us.

The ultimate outcome of boats like these is to have Aboriginal people paddling around in them; kids, families, but also non Aboriginal people. These are part of education. If people are going to be responsible for our culture they need to be educated about it, in a good way, and the best tool we have is our culture to do that. We've also got to understand that the knowledge always remains with Aboriginal people.

Yes, we're sharing it but we're not giving it a way to be exploited and we've seen that. We have to be at an important event next year, the 250th anniversary to the arrival of Cook. We have to have these boats there floating on the water. That would be important because it hasn't happened in a long time. We would like to show our presence and show that our culture is still alive and living, it's therefore for everyone to see and it's their heritage as much as it is ours.

Probably done about twenty of these now and still learning every time but you know, the boats are one thing, the other thing that comes out of this that turned out to be way way more important, was just being engaged with the Indigenous community. And this is such an important part of their culture, the boats are just one of their biggest implements and it's become a really big movement.

It's brought a lot of people together. Way more than I anticipated on this but we've had all sorts of communities start up and build more boats and get involved with things. That's what it should be about, sharing and working with them.

Relate to the tree in another way today, so this is the stringy bark and from the inner bark which is the closest to its actual body, is where we're going to create string that you can then use for the canoe making as well.

So this is the inner bark here. It's a beautiful colour and we need to make this very pliable to be able to shape it. There's a lot of possibilities with all the bark but when we start to work with it and relating with it, we're giving it more instructions as to what's possible, as well as it showing us what's possible. So in here you can see all these different fibres. All these different fibres give you strengths that's part of your relating to that tree too, part of its life cycles, becoming more and more aware. So it's not just turning something into rope, it's also relating.

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