I am a wahine (woman) Māori and I am also a settler, albeit an Indigenous one. I have benefited from the actions of my tūpuna, my ancestors, who also traveled the Parramatta River during the colonial era. Like my family, they came here to learn, to live, to trade and later to escape racism and poor economic outcomes in Aotearoa. I often wonder if they considered what the lives of the tangata whenua – the Dharug peoples – were like or if they just thought about escaping the discrimination they suffered in Aotearoa.
Rangihou Reserve was renamed in 1980 after Rangihou in the Bay of Islands, Aotearoa. At the top of the hill, above the reserve is a street named ‘New Zealand Street’ which is the site where the missionary Samuel Marsden built his seminary for young Māori from Aotearoa. It was the first place Marsden tried to convert Māori to Christianity, though he wasn’t training the students to be ministers. The seminary was a school with the specific purpose of ‘teaching’ young Māori how to be like white people and embrace English culture and language. They were taught to adhere to Western ideas of time, work and labour, and to see the land as a possession to farm and breed livestock.
The school only operated for a few years from around 1819. There were a number of deaths that Marsden thought were from the practice of sleeping on the ground outside, but considering how hot it can be in Parramatta in the summer months, sleeping outside might have been a good option. These days, the reserve can’t be seen from the riverbank, screened by thick mangroves and sandstone walls. There are now high-rise buildings standing on the site of the seminary school that my tūpuna attended here in the early 1800s.
Recently, I visited Parramatta on a warm autumn afternoon, the sun sparkling off the river, and I found myself sitting opposite Rangihou Reserve. My feet dangled off the levee and I watched the fish skip and splash. There were so many of them jumping, skipping, darting. An egret took up a position on a post and peered at me, wings outstretched. I could see time moving through life.
I watched three men on the opposite bank jostle for prime fishing spots. The grass was luscious and green and the land held the promise of fertility. The men shared a joke and one pointed to the RiverCat making substantial wash. There was a time when people fishing would have stood in the water with spears to catch fresh mullet and eels here. In fact, the name Burramattagal means ‘the place where the eels lie’. Indigenous names for places hold much knowledge, unlike non-Indigenous names for places here that generally honour wealthy white men. As a child, mullet and tuna (eels) were the only fish we ate. I didn’t then know about the connection between Indigenous people, Māori, mullet and tuna. For both peoples, the times the mullet run are times of plenty.
As the sun warmed me, I began to think of my own tūpuna who came to Parramatta, thousands of kilometres away from Aotearoa, so far away from their kainga (village). It was considered a sign of wealth and honour for Māori whānau (families) to send their children to Parramatta to be instructed by Reverend Samuel Marsden. In the history books Marsden has been characterised as altruistic but this school was also a way of holding the tamariki (children) of the chiefs of Te Tai Tokerau (far north Aotearoa) as insurance so that no harm would come to the missionaries and traders there. I wonder what my ancestors thought about their new lives here on Dharug Ngurra. Did they miss home? The day had gotten away from me, and I realised it was late afternoon. I could hear the chattering of the school children as they walked home across the Gasworks Bridge. I wondered if my own tūpuna fished here – did they catch mullet or eels? Did they interact with Dharug peoples who no doubt fished here too? What did they make of this Country, a place which we had no stories of and therefore no way of understanding our relationship to this place?
