Ngunnawal people and our colonial settlers share a common history of around 200 years; a 40,000 year old Aboriginal nation trying to deal with the takeover of their country and colonial settlers trying to survive in what they saw as a land of opportunity.
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Hamilton Hume visited the district in 1821 before his epic overland journey to Port Phillip in 1824 and settlers followed. Settlers would naturally work with what they knew; northern hemisphere farming techniques and livestock, British law, religion and property rights.
Aboriginal people would naturally want to protect and preserve their ways of managing their land which had effectively fed and sheltered them, their own belief systems and identity.
As passionately as country people love their properties and towns it remains challenging to comprehend the Aboriginal connection, the indivisible oneness with the land and the depths of grief and dislocation when this was lost to them.
Some Aboriginal people were able to remain on the big pastoral runs, but co-existence on the land could not survive the clash of land management practices and fencing off of smaller farms with the introduction of the Robertson Land Act of 1861.
Some families took up farming leases in the Rye Park area. For the Yass district Ngunnawal families, a degree of independence was maintained in the Oak Hill camp on the edge of town or the "Blacks' camp" nearer the river. For white families trying to recreate British life in an isolated rural township, it meant the often-impossible task of coming to terms with the "otherness" of these displaced people.
In 1909, Edgerton, 16km east of Yass on the river, was purchased with the aim of removing the Oak Hill and riverside people to a managed reserve. It wasn't voluntary. Ned and particularly Lucy Carroll who had lived at the riverside camp until 1912 weren't going! "The police accomplished the move by inducing Lucy into a buggy for a ride. While she was absent, they set fire to her shanty".
By 1916 however Edgerton was virtually empty. The men left to work on the Yass Railway duplication, 10 girls were taken to Cootamundra for training as domestics, and families moved back to the relative independence of community life at Oak Hill and the riverside camp.
Not for long. By 1934 families were expected to relocate to Hollywood, a new site located at what was then the top end of Rossi Street.
With so much lost, the struggle to cling to a sense of identity, pride and purpose on the edges of a community that rejected or ignored them must have been overwhelming.