It was my privilege to meet Mr Jimmy Southwood from the Kelvin Grove State College. Jimmy and the team at KGSC have undertaken eight years of research into the First Nations history of the land that their campus is built upon, consulting with Elders to design the school house totems and to refine the Indigenous Garden on campus—research work that has been verified by both the local Elders and the State Library.

Bringing me on a tour of the campus, Jimmy invited me to have a yarn about Barrambin and its importance to Turrbal Country, and from there we conversed freely about the land. As we stood on the hill and the west-to-east wind currents that give Barrambin its name washed over us, Jimmy told me about the land before us—about what is not written in colonial maps and letters, nor in colonial historical research, but is remembered in stories and songlines.

The slopes on which Kelvin Grove State College sits form the northwestern boundary of Barrambin, situated upon the land of the Turrbal and Yugara peoples. This place has been noted in colonial writings and in academic sources (see Klaebe, 2006; Moore, 2020; The Old Museum, 2018) as a place of gathering and corroborees for the local community. But what is not recorded in these texts is that it was also a place of agriculture: irrigated by the rain that gathered in swamps in the furrow of the land, Barrambin was the location of a farm where the Turrbal community cultivated medicinal and food plants, and weeds were managed by cool burning.

In the 1850s, in the midst of the gradual urban encroachment across the land, the slopes of Barrambin were destroyed to create a quarry. Stone from that quarry was taken to build Brisbane City, little more than a kilometre away. The hills still bear the mark of that destructive act, blocks of the school nestled in the uneven hillside.

As seen in the map at the start of the post (itself derived from colonial maps), the site of Kelvin Grove State College was once criss-crossed by tributaries that drained into the Barrambin swampland. Water would have flowed downhill from L’Estrange Terrace, across the oval, and into the present-day QUT campus; there was no separation between the two areas, but rather a connection, where water came from one place into the other.

Barrambin today is still, enduringly, a confluence of waters. Despite efforts to build structures of concrete and metal upon the flow paths and to redirect them underground, those waters still find their way over the land. Large overland drainage channels attempt to direct water into large stormwater drains, though oftentimes they still flow across walking pavements. Jimmy tells me that the flow through that channel turns into roaring whitewater in storm rain. An aquifer under the hill, exposed by the building works, runs into that same drain in the middle of the campus. These two water sources converge during heavy rain and flow downhill towards the QUT campus, as they always have.

Waterways, as Jimmy explains, are totemic: animals of spiritual significance to the Turrbal people—platypus, freshwater bream and freshwater turtles—reside in the waters. They are also boundary markers: the people know the borders of their territory from the watercourses and individuals, must undertake the right protocols when they cross those borders into another Country’s territory.

The removal of the waterways and filling of land comes from a utilitarian and deeply colonial view of the land—one that sees the land as a resource to be exploited and remodelled to suit the people’s convenience and fancy, as with the way that Europeans drained and filled Barrambin’s swamps. But when we remove these waterways, we deculturalise Aboriginal societies, remove boundary markers and disrupt the natural ecosystem, as well as the sustainable, cyclic processes that keep the water in balance with those who live from it.

The fact that this history is not remembered by the colonial record is a humbling reminder that our research institutions are colonial institutions, and that research must at every instance be actively decolonised. A rich and truthful understanding of Barrambin cannot rely solely on Western methods of inquiry and knowledge creation (Graham, n.d.), and indeed those methods could not reveal much of what was conveyed in conversation, during this illuminating tour.

That work is ongoing, and the research that has been done at KGSC is one piece of a much bigger picture. Many projects on the Kelvin Grove State College campus aim to re-culturalise the land of Barrambin, respect the Country, and look to pre-colonial Barrambin for sustainable practices. The Indigenous Garden on campus demonstrates what types of plants would have been cultivated in the farms of Barrambin. A water channel near the northern edge of the campus has been painted by First Nations women, who chose to depict the native platypus, bream and turtles—the totemic animals of the place—swimming along that artificial waterway.

Barrambin Farm, the aquaponics farm at KGSC that was conceptualised by Jimmy and his colleague Chris Fullon, is a microcosm of the land, looking to the natural water cycles of Barrambin and the historic waterways as the inspiration for its water-cycling design and honouring their profound importance. We have been invited to tour the farm in the near future and look forward to the insights and conversations we’ll have on the day.

Graham, M. (n.d.). Understanding Human Agency in Terms of Place: A Proposed Aboriginal Research Methodology. Philosophy Activism Nature, 6, 71–78. https://doi.org/10.3316/informit.590560058861546

Klaebe, H. (2006). Sharing Stories: A Social History Of The Kelvin Grove Urban Village. Focus Publishing. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/6097/

Moore, T. (2020, December 13). “Really rich Indigenous history”: Victoria Park’s future to celebrate its past. Brisbane Times. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/really-rich-indigenous-history-victoria-park-s-future-to-celebrate-its-past-20201211-p56mue.html

The Old Museum. (2018, October 9). Traditional story of the land- Barrambin (York’s Hollow). The Old Museum. https://www.oldmuseum.org/post/traditionalstory