The Constellations Change Rethinking Cadigal Land and the University of Sydney

Abstract

By the time Dennis Foley began searching for them, the two scar trees were long gone. Their bark-stripped trunks, which had given life to a canoe or a shield or a juguma basket, had vanished from the University of Sydney’s Camperdown grounds. Foley’s grandmother, Ruby, a Wiradjuri woman who worked at the university for 20 years, spoke of the scar trees often. They were part of a landscape Foley describes as ‘totemic’: a place where lines of meaning are inscribed on ridges and dells, in a web of stories to be deciphered, performed and refashioned by the land’s Aboriginal owners, the Cadigal people of coastal Sydney, and by other Indigenous people who use the site today.