Aboriginal history at your fingertips

Bunjil [a mythical Aborginal spirit] keeps a watchful eye on people and offers guidance to those who listen.... After creating the mountains, rivers, all living things and the laws for humans to live by, Bunjil gathered his family together and asked the crow Waa [a Moiety ancestor in Australian Aboriginal mythology] for help. Waa created a storm and Bunjil and his people were blown into the sky. There Bunjil became the [constellation] Altair. His two wives, the black swans, became stars on either side.... Bunjil Shelter [a cave in Western Victoria where the bird is believed to have resided] is a well-known visitor attraction that carries the only known rock art painting of the Bunjil." (sic)

I listen to this audio commentary on the Melbourne Dreaming App (MDA) from my mobile phone in front of the 25-metre mammoth, snow-white wedge-tail stone eagle sculpture of Bunjil, by artist. The Aboriginal mythical chubby ancestor, perched on a podium, in a manicured lawn in-between tony skyscrapers at Wurundjeri Way, Docklands, after the narrative suddenly appears quite no nonsense.

Like Bunjil, the urban landscape of the southeastern Australian state of Melbourne is peppered with contemporary art installations and age-old remnants of zig-zag etchings in rock or on tree trunks (known as scarred trees), both dedicated to the aborigines – the once thriving original inhabitants of the land Down Under later bogged down by centuries of colonial oppression.

(The Bunjil sculpture by artist Bruce Armstrong; (left) Ian Potter Centre)

That this racial politics persists even now became evident last week, when nine-year-old Harper Nielsen chose to sit out the Australian national anthem played at her school as the lyrics, "Advance Australia Fair means advance [only] the white people and we are young completely disregards the indigenous Australians who were here before us for 50,000 years..." she told reporters. Positively, 7,86,689 Australians identified themselves as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in the 2016 Census, recording a 17.4 per cent jump in their numbers from the 2011 Census. Still a small number.

While touristy brochures shush out the rich aboriginal history with the glam Melbourne Star, Eureka Skydeck 88, Queen Victoria market, Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), shopping arcades, and street art haunts such as Hosier Lane... the MDA map app only marks structures like the Bunjil.

Developed by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), and available on iTunes and Google Play at $5.99, the MDA is a worthy companion of the curious culture vulture. It GPS locates such public artworks, numbering and dividing them into categories of art and culture, heritage, scarred trees, history, walks, and landmarks. Each stop includes venue timings, entry fee and best transport routes for a self-guided tour tailored at your own time, pace and assisted by many of Melbourne's free Wi-Fi public hotspots.

Over the next few days in Melbourne, I'm able to identify and learn of many such Aboriginal elements mapped along the Yarra and the Central Business District (CBD) it cuts through. These include the Evan Walker bridge design acknowledges the Binbeal (the rainbow) and that the Kulins believed that the spirit of young children awaited their rebirth at these junctions. The skeletal frame design of the other Yarra river bridge, Webb Bridge, is inspired by Koorie eel traps, as this salt water river thrives with eels. A smaller eel trap bridge is at the Birrarung Marr Park, where Aboriginal civil rights leaders debated, an installation of metals shields represent languages of Kulin nation's five Aboriginal tribes, and the app urges you to find the art play wall that recites oral histories.

Inspired by scarred trees, on the Yarra's north bank, are 30 recycled pier poles inscribed with stories and patterns by seven Koorie artists at Enterpize Park, a haven for the homeless. Then, the MCG was a Koorie meeting place where aboriginal men and women played their own version of footie for hours using a possum skin ball. Two red gum scarred trees, next to whom the Yarra ran before engineers made it flow straight, bear markings that canoes were fashioned from their barks.

A Kings Domain Resting place, on a grassy incline near St Kilda Road, bears testimony to the countless aboriginal remains – 38 here under a plaque on a rock – displaced without permission from families because these 'rare, curious specimens' fetched high prices from British scientists. Museum Victoria, under the Aboriginal Act 2006, is a temporary repository for ancestral remains and returns these to the families. At the Koorie Heritage Trust, directed by the app, I browse through its museum of indigenous everyday objects of hunting, gaming, jewellery and utility, and oral histories. Here, the manager of education programs, Rob Hyatt, opens up on how his great great grandmother was removed from West Australia and brought to Victoria, over 3000km, as a baby, a tale of uprootal common to most non-white family histories that the Prime Minister Paul Keating apologised for in his 1967 'Redfern speech'… "We committed the murders – we took the children from their mothers". "We were once part of the flora and fauna of the country, and I want to give back to my community by promoting our culture and identity," says zoology and botany grad, with a Masters in architecture.

MDA truly opens a new side to the Land Down Under indeed.