By GRACE KARSKENS
Sydney is once more embroiled in a passionate stoush over the future of that vast, neglected area, Barangaroo. Visions of public parklands and fantasies of landscape restoration compete with a looming army of towering offices and hotels.
The history of the place is constantly touched upon in the debates, yet so little of the history is talked about. Take that name: Barangaroo. Paul Keating condemned it as ''Aboriginal kitsch'' when it was launched in 2006.
Most seem to think it's a nice-sounding name, something to do with Aborigines. Some know Barangaroo was the wife of the cross-cultural envoy, Bennelong - nicely balancing Bennelong Point at Sydney Cove. But what does she have to do with the waterfront?
Right-wing journalists became predictably apoplectic about ''political correctness''; others lamentably pun the name with ''kangaroo''. An earnest year 12 student even told me she proposed writing her major essay on the wrongness of Barangaroo as a name. It creates ''false history'', she said, because, well, we don't know anything about her.
Wrong.
Barangaroo was one of early Sydney's powerful figures. She was a Cammeragal, from around North Harbour and Manly, the largest and most influential group in the Sydney coastal region. She was probably among the women who tried to lure white men ashore in November 1788 so the Cammeragal warriors could attack them. This was a shock to English officers who thought Eora women were innocent ''Eves''.
They met Barangaroo in late 1790, finding her striking but also frightening. She had presence and authority. They estimated her age at 40; she was older, more mature, and possessed wisdom, status and influence far beyond the much younger women the officers knew.
By then, the Eora world had changed. Smallpox had swept through the population and killed perhaps 80 per cent of the people, disproportionately women and the old. But Barangaroo survived. She knew the laws, teaching and women's rituals and exercised this authority over younger women. She had lost a husband and two children to smallpox and she now had a new, younger husband: the ambitious Bennelong.
Other Eora women politely agreed to put on clothes, Barangaroo refused. All she ever wore, even at the governor's table, was a slim bone through her nose. When the whites invited her to watch a flogging, she became disgusted and furious, and tried to wrest the whip from the flogger's hands.
She was unhappy about Bennelong's consorting with them. She was so angry when he first visited Sydney, she broke his fishing spear. She refused to allow him to visit Rose Hill or go on the excursion to the Nepean River. They were both determined and short-tempered. When Bennelong hit her, she hit him back. The officers were perplexed, because the couple were obviously fond of each other and delighted on one another's company.
Why did Barangaroo try to stop Bennelong's politicking and movements? Was she just ''difficult''?
The answer may lie in fishing.
Barangaroo was a fisherwoman. Eora women's skills in fishing, swimming, diving and canoeing were extraordinary. They skimmed waters in simple bark canoes and with fires lit on clay pads for warmth and cooking. The First Fleet officers were fascinated by them. They wondered how the women could manage these ''contemptible skiffs'', fishing tackle, onboard fire, small children and babies at the breast, in surf that would terrify their toughest sailors.
David Collins wrote the women sang together as they fished and kept time with their paddles when they rowed. They were seen fishing all day, in all weathers and at night too. Eora women dominated the waters of the harbours, coves and bays and the coastlines in between. The men mostly only used canoes when they wanted to get from one cove to another.
Women such as Barangaroo were the main food providers for their families. They controlled the food supply, essential to their status, self-esteem and power in society.
What may have triggered Barangaroo's anger on first meeting the whites was fish. This meeting, on the north shore in November 1790, coincided with a massive catch of 4000 Australian salmon, hauled up in two nets. Forty fish were sent as a present to Bennelong's group. It was far more than the small group could eat, an extravagant, wasteful gift from men to men. As an Eora fisherwoman, winning fish one by one through skill and patience, Barangaroo may have felt insulted.
There were ominous implications: future alliances with these food-bearing whites meant women would lose their control over the food supply. She must have observed the way the whites dealt with Eora men, not women. Living with them, relying on their food, meant dependence on men - white and black.
Barangaroo had a baby girl in 1791. She gave birth alone. Collins came quietly to see her afterwards, astonished to see her ''walking about alone, picking up sticks to mend her fire'', the tiny reddish infant lying on soft bark.
But Barangaroo did not live long after the birth. The officers were uncharacteristically silent on why she died. She was cremated, with her fishing gear beside her, in a small ceremony. Bennelong buried her ashes carefully in the garden of Government House.
Grace Karskens is associate professor in the school of history and philosophy at the University of NSW and author of The Colony: A History of Early Sydney.