Learning to see Sydney’s Indigenous past: Book review of 'Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydne'

In the 1990s, Paul Irish was studying archaeology in Sydney. He walked to university every day, passing through the inner-city suburb of Redfern and its well-known Indigenous settlement, The Block. But Irish didn’t make any connection between the people he saw at The Block and Sydney’s Indigenous past. He assumed the residents had all come from elsewhere and that they were not ‘real’ Aborigines. Irish believed he was studying ‘real’ Aboriginal culture at university, which belonged to times and places far from modern Sydney. Like most Sydneysiders, Irish had grown up believing the Indigenous people of his city had all ‘died out or disappeared’. This was not just popular narrative; it was echoed in history books.