We Come From The Land


We Come From The Land

‘In our traditional belief, no-one can own this land,
we can only share it.’

A 1998 film by the Jerrinja and Wreck Bay Aboriginal communities of Jervis Bay
‘We Come From the Land’ is a 26 minute documentary produced by the Jerrinja and Wreck Bay Aboriginal communities.
In 1985 the Federal Government announced plans to move major naval facilities to Jervis Bay, 200 ks south of Sydney. Once again local Aboriginal communities were facing dispossession of their traditional lands and culture.
George Brown, a Wreck Bay elder and Delia Lowe a Jerrinja community leader take the audience on a journey of Jervis Bay revealing the wealth of their Aboriginal heritage and their relationship to the land.
As George Brown says, ‘Beecroft Peninsula(the northern side of Jervis Bay) is the most sensitive and the strongest part of the Dreamings and place of origin of the thirteen tribes of the South Coast.’
In 1988, at the time of the film’s production, the future of Jervis Bay was at stake.
Would the government’s plan to build the largest naval base on the East coast of Australia become reality or alternatively, as suggested by George Brown, a National Park jointly run with the Aboriginal people, for the benefit of all?

In 1995 the Booderee National Park (the southern peninsula of Jervis Bay) was declared. The Park is managed jointly by the Wreck bay Aboriginal community and the Federal Government’s Department of the Environment and Heritage.