It is important to understand that several of the British officers in the First Fleet and subsequent garrison reinforcements had seen active service in the French-American War and the American War of Independence. For example, the background military service of some of the early British invading forces included:

This frontier experience on the eastern seaboard of North America provided these officers with a simplistic model of First Nations people. Having seen Native Americans and their tribal system of chiefs, they assumed that the Port Jackson clans were similar. They often referred to the Indigenous Australians as Indians.^[7]

The subsequent appointment of Aboriginal ‘chiefs’ by Governor Macquarie altered the dynamics of an already fragile and fractured Indigenous society within the Sydney environs in 1815-16.^[8] The Eora society had already been decimated by smallpox, venereal disease and a protracted guerrilla war of attrition as the colony spread into Aboriginal pastures and fisheries, depriving them of food and disrupting what had been a stable co-existence within the landscape.^[9] The misinterpretation of the concept of a chief, or kingship, blinded the invaders to an understanding of the pluralistic societies of Indigenous Australia. A possible exception was Lieutenant William Dawes whose relationship with a young Indigenous woman, Patyegarang, enabled him not only to grasp the Eora languages, but it seems from his journals that he may also have obtained an insight into the Eora societal structure.^[10] Apart from Dawes, within the Western scientific knowledge system there was little debate over the preconceived idea of the supremacy of normal science in the identification and determination of legitimate knowledge. Indigenous Australia was not granted any legitimacy.^[11]

The pluralistic style of society of Aboriginal Australia was an unknown concept to the invader. In their ignorance, the British could only determine chiefdoms. Subconsciously or consciously this system imposed a male-dominated class system over the once peaceful, homologous matrilineal Eora, which includes (but is not limited to) Wangle, Cadigal, Gai-mariagal, Gur-ing-gah, Bidgingal, Wallumattagal, Burramattagal and Darug clans.^[12] The acceptance of a male-dominated class system is based on an incorrect assumption that has been retained by several generations of Australian-born descendants of the British invaders.

Accustomed to Native America, the British also incorrectly assumed that the major social divisions were tribes,^[13] with a tribe considered to be a group of people under a recognised chief. Anthropologist Ronald Berndt has said ‘most of us have become so used to speaking of Australian aboriginal tribes that we have rarely paused to examine their composition or the appropriateness of such a term’.^[14]

The Eora pre-1788 was a society devoid of individuals seeking status, revenge or capital gains, as these were negative personal attributes not tolerated in the Elders circle.^[15] It was a pluralist society that did not experience dominance and leadership in the Western sense. While I accept that some group members had greater powers and rights than others, these differences were due to seniority of age and knowledge such as that gained though initiation, for example.^[16]

An Indigenous academic, I am not a member of a tribe, I belong to a clan. Through my mother, I am a member of a matrilineal clan, the Gai-mariagal people of the Guringah language group. My matrilineal land is that country which is now called the northern suburbs of Sydney. I will use several oral history references from them. My father is of Wiradjuri, Capertee/Turon River clan descent, which is also a rich oral history resource that I use in this paper. Critics of this paper in its draft form stated that oral histories and family viewpoints do not add to overall knowledge. The denial of oral history when compared to history from the pen of an English military person, or the primary records of a missionary, a police officer or public servant reinforces the Eurocentric concept that ‘knowledge is power, or power is knowledge’^[17] — as long as you are white, protestant and a male, especially in the early days of the colony. It is widely accepted that oral history is fragmented, and that the knowledge that has been retained is subject to societal destruction. This means that Indigenous scholars are forced to confirm their history only from within modernity’s biased written record. This is a transgressive step away from acknowledging the implications of oral history and the substantiation of Indigenous epistemologies. The role of Indigenous Australian narrative discourse ‘plays a decisive role … [in] personal and social identity as well as in the transmission of cultural knowledge’.^[18] Indigenous oral history is a legitimate reference for the recipients of such knowledge within their own clan.

From this inheritance, I am asserting that Australia has an Aboriginal history, a history that allows Indigenous epistemological practices.