Progress on the construction of my kayak and its paddles is in a temporary holding pattern while other distractions (domestic duties and work) take precedence.
"Bennelong Point from Dawes Point", circa 1804, attributed to John Eyre.
Anyway, having recently attended the Mari Nawi exhibition at the State Library of NSW, I've been thinking about the following quote (taken from the exhibition catalogue) which refers to the Cadigal people of Sydney Harbour:
"Theirs was a canoe culture and the waters of Port Jackson were their true highways."
(Keith Vincent Smith, Historian and exhibition curator)
.jpg)
Detail from "Bennelong Point from Dawes Point".
The above quote (along with supporting evidence from early observers such as Watkin Tench and John Hunter) makes a lot of sense to anyone familiar with Sydney Harbour's branching waterways. Canoes would have been an excellent form of transport and an effective means for the gathering and hunting of food.
So, if we accept that canoes were indeed central to the Cadigal people, then one would also expect that there would have been some depth of complexity and variety to their canoe designs.
As with the qajaqs and umiaqs developed over many centuries by the Inuit people of the Arctic regions, one might also expect that the Cadigal would have developed specific canoes for specific purposes - such as hunting canoes for the men (fast through the water, designed for launching spears at fish beneath the water's surface) and gathering canoes for the women and their children (stable platforms for fishing from, with small fires on board) - as depicted above.
I understand that, in tradtional practice, some Cadigal men were buried within their prized canoes amongst the sand dunes of Rose Bay along with their most valued possessions - spears and other hunting implements.
Perhaps the formation of a new sand bunker on the Rose Bay golf course or the excavation of a basement to a house in this sandy saddle linking the harbour with Bondi will one day reveal a canoe or two. The detailed study of such canoes may shed some light on the variety of task-specific designs that surely existed amongst the original paddle craft of this harbour.
Zooming out a little, the diagram above (sourced from Austronesian Canoe Origins - Edwin Doran) describes the distribution of indigenous bark and outrigger canoes along the east coast of Australia. (It does not include the reed canoes of Tasmania. And, curiously, it is blank on Western Australia)
The presence of the outrigger canoes in the north indicates the influence of canoe designs from across the Arafura Sea along with the ensuing fact that the people of northern Australia ventured further offshore in their canoes (where additional stability was required) than their single-hulled coast-hugging cousins in the south.
The extensive use of canoes to travel through the Murray-Darling River Basin is also an interesting, and perhaps under-recognised, fact.
It would appear that there is much to be known about paddle craft of the original inhabitants of this large island. Certainly it is clear that there is an extensive precedent for paddlecraft in Australia. And, as with the development of local contemporary architecture, the potential for drawing upon local origins in kayak design is great.
