Dancing in the park

Date

November 10, 2012

Jenny Brown

Many ancient Aboriginal gathering sites remain public spaces.

The corroboree tree at St Kilda Junction. Photo: Gary Medlicott

An admittedly esoteric strand of archaeology proposes that physical landscapes, even heavily altered landscapes, can sometimes hold the resonances of past cultural uses and spiritual associations.
It's an ''out there'' idea and yet, in looking around the parts of Melbourne that early white settlers recorded as having cultural significance for the traditional Wurundjeri or Boonwurrung Aboriginal owners, there is often an eerie coincidence that many have remained as public open space, or have become the sites of important public buildings and institutions.
Because they attracted unusually large gatherings of natives, white diarists paid closest attention to camping, meeting and corroboree places. A big corroboree was held on the site of Parliament House in 1836. In the following year, colonial police were authorised to break up such ''ngarrga'' or dance celebrations.

William Barak's Corroboree is auctioned. Photo: James Davies

But still they happened. Port Melbourne's founder, Wilbraham Liardet, made a retrospective painting of a full-moon corroboree involving 50 men he had witnessed on the site of South Melbourne Town Hall in 1840.

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A corroboree also took place on the sites of Melbourne Town Hall and the Supreme Court, and on the hill now occupied by Government House. The MCG parklands hosted major moonlight parties, and St Kilda Junction's famous corroboree tree was preserved because pioneer locals could recall scenes of stamping feet ''that haunted the soul for many years after''.
The associations of sacred sites to what later became sporting fields can be manipulated to suggest there might well be a deep resonance to feet moving in circles: Kooyong Park in Hawthorn, and Victoria Park where the Collingwood Football Club played for more than a century, were both corroboree grounds. So were Como Park and Fawkner Park in South Yarra.
An onlooker at Fawkner Park in the 1850s described men with bodies streaked in red and white ochre, dancing ''like skeletons around the blazing fire, shouting and brandishing their long spears while the lubras chanted and played on drums made of wild skins of animals''.
Could the idea of memory-embedded landscape also be drawn with contemporary commercial stamping grounds? Chapel Street is recorded as a corroboree place. Could the link be made between sacred sites of different cultural and spiritual denominations?
Regular corroborees took place on one of Kew's highest points, where Xavier College's Chapel now stands, and on the spot where Christ Church, South Yarra, holds the high ground.
Full moons and high places were among the preferred times and places. Malvern Town Hall sits over a corroboree ground. And around the 137-metre-high ancient volcanic cone of Mount Cooper in what is now Bundoora Park, numerous stone tool quarries, scar trees and artefact scatters suggest a heavily used celebration place. The name Nunawading translates as ''a battle or ceremonial ground''.
In 1857, a young boy watched in awe as 200 ''Gippsland blacks'' headed through Elsternwick towards an inter-tribal dance gathering held on the grounds that Rippon Lea estate now occupies. He never forgot ''the strange grave dances of the corroboree circle''.
In Burnley Park, Richmond, in 1926, another young lad climbed the signposted ''corroboree tree'' and to his amazement retrieved a boomerang that had become wedged in its branches some time in the measureless past when the Kulin, ''the people'', were still dancing.


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