Introduction Aboriginal voices were largely absent from Australian public consciousness well into the twentieth century. As most Australians are aware nowadays, Aborigines were recognised as citizens only in 1969 when all (previously only some) were awarded full citizenship rights. Since then, a significant paradigm shift moved the public debate from the acknowledgment of basic rights for Indigenous people to demands for the acknowledgment of the past wrong doings, healing of Aboriginal communities and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. These demands have been part of a broader awareness that dominant practices in Western societies have excluded many marginalised voices. The paradigm shift is reflected in changes in education and in democratising influences of technology, both providing new opportunities for inclusion while carrying the baggage of old divides.
The shift is reflected also in new paradigms of research. In the past, anthropological and linguistic interests tended to follow explorers, missionaries and administrators to the far corners of the continent: for decades the principal academic interest focused on the Indigenous remote, the exotic and the comparatively untouched rather than the regions where the great majority of Aborigines actually lived. Yet the many thousand Aboriginal people living in Sydney, thought to be academically uninteresting for so long, have rich and complex lives in which the internal life of communities is at least as significant as the interaction between those communities and government bodies which had been the prime focus of historical enquiry. The project stems from a renewed interest in the Indigenous people of Sydney not seen perhaps for two centuries, and from the desire to return the available information to the people who are most affected by it.