FCA Members Media Stories

April 2026
Nikkie Asia
Report by FCA Member Barbara Backhausen – German/Swiss media

Story in German/Swiss
Translation

Time Travel in Sydney
Why the World’s Most Famous Harbour Is Actually an Ancient Archive

Long before ferries and skyscrapers, Sydney Harbour was a river valley and a cultural highway. Today, Aboriginal guides are revealing the deep history still embedded in its shores.
Imagine standing on the deck of a ferry in Sydney Harbour. You see the white sails of the Opera House. You see the steel arch of the Bridge. Now dial the clock back 10,000 years.
The salt water vanishes. The bridge disappears. You are standing at the edge of a jagged sandstone gorge, looking down into a lush green river valley. Instead of the hum of jet engines, there is the deafening song of the lyrebird and the scent of sweet banksia nectar. This was not a harbour. It was a highway.
“A long time ago, there was dry land,” says Brock Naumann, an indigenous guide with Tribal Warrior, the Aboriginal-led organisation that has been running cultural harbour cruises since 1998. “People could walk from island to island by natural land bridges,” he explains and then delivers the indigenous narrative. “The way this harbour came about is the people weren’t looking after the land or each other the way they should have. So the spirit sent down this massive eel, and that eel slapped its body down and created a flood that never went away.”
Most visitors encounter Sydney Harbour from above: from rooftop bars, the Pylon Lookout, or the glass flanks of Sydney Tower. The Tribal Warrior cruise turns that perspective on its head. Out on the water, with the skyline receding behind you and sandstone headlands rising ahead, the city begins to feel fleeting – and the harbour reveals itself as something far older than its postcard image.
The organisation takes its name from a traditional Aboriginal vessel, and its mission is as much about cultural reclamation as tourism. Founded in Redfern, it is community-controlled and not-for-profit, governed by a board of Aboriginal people from the Eora Nation – the collective term for the clans of the coastal Sydney region, broadly meaning “people from this place.” Among them are the Gadigal, whose Country encompasses the southern shores of the harbour, including today’s CBD. Their knowledge of this landscape was not incidental; it was encyclopaedic – embedded in story, song, and stone.
The Midden Archives
At Bennelong Point – the narrow tongue of land now occupied by the Opera House – Tribal Warrior guide Kiara Naumann, Brock’s sister, pauses to describe what the British encountered on arrival. Not emptiness, not wilderness, but evidence. “The British found these middens very early on,” she says. “Two to three stories high. That is higher than this vessel. That was tens of thousands of years of our people feeding off this harbour before the British ever got here.”
Middens – the archaeological term for accumulated shell deposits – are, in effect, biological time capsules. The shells and bones preserved within them reveal what people ate, when they harvested, and how they managed marine resources over millennia – often sustainably, without depletion.
The Sandstone Map
The harbour’s islands hold another kind of archive. Clark Island, known before colonisation as Belong Le-wool, was once a men’s ceremonial site – and later the stage for one of the more quietly subversive episodes of early colonial Australia. “Clark Island comes from Ralph Clark, a lieutenant in the British colony,” Brock Naumann explains. “He used it as a farm and planted all sorts of non-native crops – there were even bananas. But the local convicts and the Aboriginal people came to an agreement. Anything he planted on this island, he was never able to harvest.” This was one of the first places where Aboriginal people and white people worked together.
Elsewhere, carved into sandstone ridges along the harbour’s headlands, are rock engravings of marine animals, human figures, and spiritual forms – some thousands of years old. These are not merely artworks. They are part of a sophisticated knowledge system: the physical expression of Songlines, networks of story-paths that functioned simultaneously as maps, legal codes, and oral libraries, enabling people to navigate vast distances through a landscape encoded in song.
The Modern Guardians
Goat Island – Me-Mel, meaning “eye of the eel” – is in the process of being returned to the Aboriginal Land Council. Its original custodians plan to restore it to its pre-colonial state. Some of the structures built by white settlers might be taken down. “You won’t have to imagine what that island looked like,” says Kiara Naumann. “It will look like how it once did.”
In miniature, that act of reclamation mirrors what Tribal Warrior’s cruises are doing every day. While the hustle of modern Sydney keeps life trapped within schedules, data, and glass facades, the guides invite you to look past the concrete and steel – and discover an ancient civilisation.
Tribal Warrior Aboriginal Corporation operates cultural harbour cruises from Circular Quay, Sydney. Bookings via tribalwarrior.org.