New museum's garden artwork recovered four lost First Nations words

Amid the high-rises of Western Sydney's CBD is a pocket of greenery filled with native plants and a nod to a Burramattagal man who played a key role in documenting local flora.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the names of an Indigenous person who has died.

Daniel Moowattin's contributions were barely mentioned in official records, a history of silencing that the new Powerhouse Parramatta is trying to change.

An artwork featuring bronze plaques imprinted with eucalyptus clippings celebrating Moowattin has been installed at the new museum, which officially opens this Saturday.

Artist Keg de Souza worked with Dharug elder Uncle Chris Tobin to retrace the work of Moowattin, who was integral to the work of British botanist George Caley in the early 1800s.

"The collector was always George Caley, but obviously Daniel Moowattin was actually the collector climbing up the trees and collecting those things,"

de Souza said.

In his personal herbarium notes, Caley acknowledged he had received clippings from Moowattin, with a handwritten annotation that read "got by Dan".

However, these attributions were removed from official herbarium records.

de Souza worked with Uncle Chris to collect clippings from eucalyptus trees on Dharug country, including near the new Powerhouse at Parramatta Park.

"By following these people's journey, you start to get an understanding of that era," Uncle Chris said.

Digging through archives

Curator Emerson Radisich searched nature archives for months to find herbarium records from Caley that had the annotations.

With one record from NSW, Mr Radisich searched every other state and territory before he found a second mention at the National Herbarium in Canberra.

"From that point, I just went around the world, and I started at Kew Gardens [in London] and I traced where those herbarium sheets were subsequently sent to or sold to," he said.

"Most of the major herbariums around the world had George Caley records, but they all had the original handwriting taken off them."

Mr Radisich said "if archival workers and botanists 200 years ago had cared", there could have been hundreds of records of Moowattin's contributions.

"There was a lot of silence that we experienced as we were doing this research,"

he said.

Eventually, Mr Radisich located about 100 herbarium sheets recorded by Caley at the Natural History Museum in the UK.

"We started to notice more handwritten notations that seemed to have Dharug language words on them," he said.

Some of the words were still used today, Mr Radisich added, but there were a few words that did not come up in an online search, and were not familiar to any First Nations directors at the Powerhouse.

The research led to the recovery of four words related to eucalyptus species in the Dharug language.

The team worked with Bayala Aboriginal Corporation which confirmed Dhuramba as the Dharug language name for Eucalypt Paniculata.

The three other words will be confirmed by Bayala Aboriginal Corporation before being formally published.

Cemented in history

de Souza used eucalyptus clippings collected with Uncle Chris to produce five bronze plaques that were embedded into the pavement of the Powerhouse rooftop.

She walked Uncle Chris around the garden while the finishing touches were underway ahead of the museum's official opening this Saturday.

It was the first time Uncle Chris saw the work cemented into the new cultural institution.

"It's proudly done, it is done respectfully so that people, hopefully, start to look at Aboriginal learnings and Aboriginal history with a lot more respect," he said.

"I think it helps raise our profile, and also people will start to appreciate that the Aboriginal story is part of Parramatta's story.

"It's foundational to Parramatta's story, it's one we're a part of; contemporary Parramatta too."

de Souza hopes the work invites people to learn more about local nature and Dharug language.

"This whole project for me is like a project of learning ... and I wanted people to have the opportunity to sort of learn and engage with it," she said.