Sydney Academy of Sport
The site was the last community Aboriginal town camp to survive in the northern Sydney suburbs. Probably, before the British invasion, Narrabeen Lagoon was one of the many coastal occupation sites offering seasonal shelter, fish and wetland resources. Until perhaps 1850, the western end of the Lake was a community and secular living area standing in relation to the higher country of the Collaroy plateau above. This higher and less accessible country was used for ceremonial and educational purposes by the Gai-Mariagal. Dennis Foley, a Gai-mariagal (Camaraigal) descendant, describes the area as ‘the heart of our world’.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries most of the other northern town camp sites were resumed for housing or recreation by state and shire governments. Similar sites at Quakers Hat Bay, Mosman and Brookvale were probably gone by 1930. The Narrabeen site survived longer because of its inaccessibility, and was not seriously threatened until the opening of the Wakehurst Parkway in 1946.
By the end of the Second World War the Narrabeen Lagoon town camp had become a more or less permanent refuge for Koori people having kin connections throughout the north-coastal areas, as well along the Hawkesbury River. Dennis Foley, a Gai-mariagal, remembers visiting the site with his uncles or mother in the 1950s, by which time perhaps fewer than twenty people were in permanent residence. Often his mother brought a bag of flour or a cake.
During the 1950s a thirty hectare site was developed at the National Fitness Centre, including several ovals and accommodation for more than fifty people. The town camp was seen as having no value, and in keeping with the assimilationist thrust of the day, the humpies were destroyed and the people forcibly trucked to the western suburbs.
No signage today records the presence of the camp within what is now the Sydney Academy of Sport.