Celebrating 100 Indigenous UNSW Law Graduates 100-Indigenous-Law-Graduates-Event_Booklet_V13_FIN | Page 32

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Aboriginal History of the Main UNSW Campus
As part of the UNSW 2025 Strategy, the University engaged
historian Paul Irish, author of Hidden In Plain View: The Aboriginal
People of Coastal Sydney (NewSouth Publishing), to provide a
historical and anthropological history of UNSW.
The following draws upon that report, but also frames the history
according to a timeline, or phases, of Australian history that help
us to understand the impact of laws and policies upon the lives of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples since first contact.
A timeline of Aboriginal occupation of the area encompassing
UNSW consists of the following sequential phases: Pre-
contact; First contact and Invasion; Conciliation; Frontier Wars;
Compulsory Racial Segregation; Assimilation; Self-determination;
Post self determination. It is important to note here that the Uluru
Statement from the Heart resolutely refers to the arrival of the
British as an invasion.
The UNSW Kensington Campus is a veneer built on top of an
ancient landscape of high sand dunes and swampy swales. You
can feel this topography as you walk east across the campus from
ANZAC Parade, or drive up High or Barker Streets, climbing the
western side of one of these tall dunes. They are tens of thousands
of years old and many metres deep.
When they were formed the world was in the middle of the last ice
age. There was no ice in Sydney, but temperatures were cooler
and sea levels were much lower, leaving the coast many kilometres
further east than today. Botany Bay did not yet exist (fig. 1).
Cooks River
Alexandra Canal
dugong
6,000 years old
Wolli Creek campsite
10,500 years old
Kensington
Campus
Hearth
8,500 years old
Georges River
2km
Fig.1 The landscape c.20,000 years ago and some
early Aboriginal places
An excavation near the site of Prince of Wales Hospital uncovered
an Aboriginal hearth approximately 8,500 years old (fig. 2).
Aboriginal people continued to live in coastal Sydney in the
millennia since the Prince of Wales Hospital hearth was used, and
their way of life changed considerably over that time. We can sense
this just by looking at the new technologies they adopted.