Max Dulumunmun Harrison leads our walk.
Photo: Daniel Neilsen
We walked around various tracks at Kuringgai Park with Dean and Uncle Max. At each rock platform we saw a different combination of images picked into the rock. We talked about what the group may mean.
Where were the people’s feet, that is where they are from. Where are the fish heading, that is where you will find them in the bay below. Each item in the drawing had a meaning, such as the figure with two right feet showing different directions of travel.
Many figures, men and women, wore hair belts, as initiands. Different tools were shown for fishing and cooking. Uncle Max knew many of these stories from seeing this done when he was a child.
The rocks were scored with different tools, and in some locations there were channels scored to keep the water away from eroding the carvings.
We considered how long it would take to start one such drawing, and how people would sit together and work to renew them. Some carvings had been recently chipped over, and mistakes made in trying to re-draw the story.
We had lunch under the trees with the bush turkey. We talked about how language comes from the land, and how we may be able to recover lost knowledge by listening to the land