Aboriginal Sydney

The greeting could have come from just about anyone in Australia. And the name had a comfortingly familiar ring, too. “G’day,” said Shane, “and welcome aboard. This afternoon we’re going to show you Sydney as you’ve never seen it before. Help yourselves to a drink from the cool box, then sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Shane Phillips was our captain for an outing on the Tribal Warrior, a venerable vessel dating back to 1899 and originally used as a pearling lugger. For almost 10 years the boat has been owned and run by a group of Aborigines, whose aim is to provide tourists with an alternative take on Australia’s best known city — and to help reinstate some pride in a culture and way of life that has all but disappeared. Welcome to Sydney from an Aboriginal perspective.

The tour kicked off on the quay right in front of the Sydney Opera House, the extraordinary shell-like structures of which were gleaming in the early afternoon sunlight. This fabulous building is the quintessential symbol of modern Sydney, but it also hints at a past when Shane’s ancestors used to fish around here with simple hooks and vines and discard the shells on the peninsula of land today known as Bennelong Point. Those shells in turn were used by the early settlers to make lime for mortar for some of the first buildings to line these shores.