Brian Syron - Life

Life

He was born on 19 November 1934 in Eora country in the inner city suburb of Balmain, Sydney, New South Wales, but, as he wrote in various papers and books:

When I was born our people had already experienced a holocaust beyond imagining. There were no Eora living a lifestyle of any kind on the banks of Tuhbowgule (Sydney Harbour), Kamay (Botany Bay) or Deerubin (Hawkesbury River). My birthplace had experienced a massacre from 1790 to 1802 and my people were our country's first resistance fighters

Syron also lived an indigenous life with his paternal grandmother in his ancestral Birrippi lands at Minimbah, New South Wales, seven miles (11 km) up the Coolongolook River from Forster and 200 miles (320 km) north of Balmain. Minimbah means in Birripi language "Home of the Teacher" and his traditional country encompassed Taree, Forster and the Great Lakes area of the Wang Wauk and Coolonglook rivers on the North Coast. He was a child of a bicultural marriage with his mother coming from the coal fields of Yorkshire, England. His paternal dreaming was the Eagle, although he described himself as a Magpie - half black, half white. He was also exposed to Aboriginal mission life at Purfleet and Forster through the 1930s and early 1940s and spent time as a 14 and 15-year old in Grafton Correctional Centre. Even with this background Syron told the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) on 15 November 1992:

I have no mortgage on being dispossessed or having a tough life. We've all had it. Every Aboriginal person I know of in my generation has had one hell of a time. Nobody has a mortgage on that. We've all been through it. Our obligation, our mandate, as artists is to communicate with our people first.{Syron, HREOC, 15.11.92}

Brian Syron died of leukemia on 14 October 1993 in his Eora country birthplace.

Read more about this topic:  Brian Syron

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    It has been from Age to Age an Affectation to love the Pleasure of Solitude, among those who cannot possibly be supposed qualified for passing Life in that Manner.
    Richard Steele (1672–1729)

    You haf slafed your life away in de bosses’ mills and your fadhers before you and your kids after you yet. Vat is a man to do with seventeen-fifty a week? His wife must work nights to make another ten, must vork nights and cook and wash in day an’ vatfor? So that the bosses can get rich an’ the stockholders and bondholders. It is too much... ve stood it before because ve vere not organized. Now we have union... We must all stand together for union.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    I was by degrees awakened as from a dream, and feared that my whole life could properly be counted nothing else but a fantastic vision.
    Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)