Tubowgule

The land on which the Sydney Opera House stands was known to its traditional custodians, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, as Tubowgule. It is part of a broader cultural landscape where Aboriginal people have feasted, sung, danced and told stories on Country for generations. Tubowgule is a point jutting out into the harbour flanked by Warrane (Sydney Cove) to the west and Wahganmuggalee (Farm Cove in the Royal Botanic Garden) to the east.

Tubowgule was a rocky point located at the end of a long, wide ridge and surrounded by rocky shoals that mostly covered at high tide. It was part of an area rich in resources for Aboriginal people with proximity to the harbour, cove, and a fresh water creek and its mud flats (known as the Tank Stream on the west side of Sydney Cove) providing oysters, mussels and fish. The area would also have had possums, wallabies, kangaroos, and many edible plants. The discarded remnants of the shell and bone from the meals made by Aboriginal people became ‘middens’ located at around Sydney Harbour.

Its current name honours Woollarawarre Bennelong, a senior Eora man at the time of the first British settlement in Australia in 1788. Kidnapped by the first Governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, Bennelong served as an interlocutor between the Eora and the British, both in Sydney and London, where he attended the theatre, museums and Houses of Parliament. In 1790, at his request, Governor Phillip built him a hut on the point that now bears his name. After being taken to England, Bennelong did not return to Tubowgule and instead lived at Kissing Point. The hut was demolished and bricks reused elsewhere in the colony.