artist - curator - researcher
bayad'yu budyari dharuggu yiyura
yiyura ngurrabirang
bayad'yu budyari dharugg warangad baranyi, yagu, baribagu yiyuragu
I speak well of the Dharug people,
The People belonging to Country
I speak well of the Old ones past, present and the future people
For more than 60,000 years Aboriginal generations have held deeply spiritual knowledges,
values and skills as - Country.
Warami
This is my introduction page
My Dharug family are custodians, Ngurrawa Marringong (or Muringong) meaning being in a Country with many waterholes connecting Georges and Nepean Rivers, in the southwest Sydney basin.
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The following images present an intervention of early colonial graphic archives depicting Muringong Ngurra (Country). A "Map of the Cowpastures: Where the Wild Herds Were Found" (1795), was produced after Crown explorers and botanists found a cave painting of the lost cattle herds brought onto our Country with the the first English fleets.
A map was made by a Crown appointed botanist George Caley. In this creative intervention I reveal a formation of grasses and small trees marked as the letter E., thus named a "green dingle," a Dharug intervention finds a sign of our ancestral cultural practice now known as "cool burning." The practice is highly significant, used to care for country. For example, cultivating areas for growing and or seasonal herding of animals for food , material culture and more.
Venessa Possum, intervention of a colonial archive 2020, Citation: "WHERE THE WILD HERDS WERE FOUND IN 1795"
(1932, August 13), The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954).
Venessa Possum, goolamon dyarraba - giver of a fire stick, intervention of a colonial archive 2020.
Colonial Archives "Graphic"
George Caley "The Limits and Boundaries of the Vaccary Forest" c1804.
Venessa Possum muru Murungong Burragal (baragula – flood tides) 2023. Ink and ochre on Arches paper; New South Wales. Water Resources Commission. (1982). Camden flood inundation map Nepean River Retrieved September 17, 2023, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-234290742.
