Barangaroo Reserve

This six-hectare headland park is named after a woman who told the colonists to get absolutely stuffed, and the fact that the precinct is not even on her traditional lands just adds to the irony.

Barangaroo was a Cammeraygal fisherwoman born around seventeen-fifty. When the British arrived, she refused to wear their clothes, refused to drink their wine, and refused to adopt their customs. She was not passive about it either. When she witnessed colonists hauling in four thousand salmon in a single catch -- far more than anyone could eat -- she was outraged by the waste and let them know it. In a colony obsessed with making Aboriginal people behave like Europeans, Barangaroo was having absolutely none of it.

Eora fisherwomen like Barangaroo were the primary food providers for their communities. European observers noted that these women fished and paddled canoes in surf that would terrify their toughest sailors, managing onboard fires and children at the same time. When Barangaroo died around seventeen-ninety-one, she received a traditional cremation ceremony and her husband Bennelong -- the same Bennelong from the Opera House site -- scattered her ashes around Governor Phillip's garden at what is now Circular Quay.

The park itself is an engineering feat. The headland you are standing on is essentially artificial. Ten thousand sandstone blocks were used to recreate the natural foreshore that existed before eighteen thirty-six, when the area was flattened for shipping wharves. They rebuilt a headland. The shape is based on historical records and geological surveys of what the coastline looked like before Europeans changed it.

So here is the full picture. A precinct named after an Aboriginal woman who rejected European culture, built on a man-made headland that recreates a pre-colonial landscape, on land that was not even hers. The contradictions are the point.