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:
“Glorious bouquets and storms of applause ... are the trimmings which every artist naturally enjoys. But to move an audience in such a role, to hear in the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life itself. Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes part of one’s own life.”
—Dame Alice Markova (b. 1910)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—”
—Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)